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CHRISTOPHER

MARLOWE

A BIOGRAPHICAL AND
CRITICAL STUDY '

FREDERICK S. BQAS

M,A. (OxoN.)5 Hon. LL.D. (St. Andrews);
Hon. D.Lit. (Belfast), F.R.S.L.

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1940

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
AMEN HOUSE, E.C. 4
London Edinburgh Glasgow New York
Toronto Melbourne Capetown Bombay
Calcutta Madras
HUMPHREY MILFORD

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

PREFACE

T he author of a recent brilliant work on Sir Thomas
More states in his preface that he has striven to
imitate More’s early biographers, who Trooded for twenty
or thirty years before writing the life of their hero’. I
doubt whether I have the philosophic capacity to brood,
but I have been engaged in the study of Marlowe’s life
and writings for over forty years. And since 1920 I have
had to record annually in the English Association’s The
Yearns Work in English Studies the new contributions to
Marlovian scholarship.

In 1929, in Marlowe and his Circle^ I tried to sum up
the biographical results achieved in the era that had been
opened by Professor]. Leslie Hotson’s The Death of Christo-
pher Marlowe (1925). The completion^^in 1933, of the
six-volume edition of Marlowe’s Life'md Works
the general editorship of Professor R. H. Case, to which
I contributed Doctor FaustuSy suggested to me that it
would be opportune to attempt a comprehensive study
from both the biographical and the critical iylgles. Various
causes, including two visits to the U.S.A., have delayed
the fulfilment of this plan till now, but I have thus been
enabled to refer to the chief recent additions to Marlovian
research. These include the documents relating to the
Marlowe and Baines families printed by Professor C. F.
Tucker Brooke in his Life of Marlowe in the six-volume
edition, the new facts about Robert Poley supplied in
articles by Miss Ethel Seaton and Miss E. de Kalb; the
new light thrown from the Middlesex Guildhall archives
by Mr. Mark Eccles on Marlowe’s London life; the
details about the Coroner’s jury gathered from their wills
by my lamented friend, Edgar Vine Hall; and the results
of the researches by Mr. John Bakeless in the archives
preserved at Canterbury and at Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge.

Twenty years ago Professor G. C. Moore Smith drew

PREFACE

valuable new information about Marlowe’s Cambridge
career from the Corpus Christi College Account books.
To Mr. Bakeless we are now indebted for disclosing a fresh
source in the College Buttery books recording Kit’s ex-
penditure from week to week, of which he gave a few
details in his recent volume, Christopher Marlowe, By the
kindness of the Estates Bursar of Corpus Christi College,
Mr. T. R. B. Sanders, I have been able to examine the
Buttery books and to draw conclusions from the evidence
that they supply, compared with that of the scholarship
payments in the Account books, about the periods of
Marlowe’s residence at the College. The Estates Bursar
has also allowed me to reproduce part of a leaf from the
Buttery book that contains Marlowe’s first item of ex-
penditure. Other documents here reproduced in facsi-
mile, so far as I know, for the first time are the inquisi-
tion returned by the Coroner on Marlowe’s deaths and
parts of Richard Baines’s original ‘Note’.

While not attempting to fill in the background of the
Elizabethan ‘scene’ or theatre I have tried to follow up
all clues concerning Marlowe himself and such related
figures as Poley, Frizer, and Baines. Here I have in-
corporated parts of Marlowe and his Circle, with the
requisite additions and modifications. Every piece of new
evidence gives greater significance to Poley’s career and
brings Richard Baines into clearer view. It will be seen
that the picture here presented of Marlowe differs in con-
siderable degree from the traditional conception of him as
‘unhappy in his life and end’, though an enigmatic element
remains.

In my critical interpretation of the plays and poems
special attention has been given to two aspects. Recent
investigation has proved that, however revolutionary
otherwise, Marlowe was remarkably faithful to his
sources. I have therefore entered into a detailed analy-
sis of his plots in relation to these sources, and I have

^ The pardon granted to Frizer, incorporating almost all the inquisi-
tion, is facsimiled in Dr. Hotson’s The Death of Christopher Marlowe.

PREFACE vii

suggested that the texts of Doctor Faustus and The
Massacre at Paris, though undoubtedly imperfect, pre-
serve more of the dramatist’s original work than is usually
allowed. The other aspect which I have emphasized is the
extent and the quality of classical influence on Marlowe,
not only in the translations and Dido, but throughout
his work. In the light of these and other aspects of his
dramatic technique I have approached the perplexing
problems raised by The First Part of the Contention and The
True Tragedy, and have stated a case for Marlowe’s author-
ship of Arden of Feversham. The quotations from the plays
and poems are given with modernized spelling and punc-
tuation. A reprint with these in their original form, as in
Professor Tucker Brooke’s Oxford edition, is indispensable
for textual criticism. But for the purposes of a more gene-
ral study there is a balance of gain over loss in adopting
the familiar form of presentation. Quotations from docu-
ments, on the other hand, are, as a rule, in the original
spelling, though contractions have been silently expanded.
References to these documents will be mainly found in the
list that follows the last chapter, while those to later,
including contemporary, authorities are given (without
courtesy prefixes) in the footnotes, though some duplica-
tion has been unavoidable.

Besides the obligations acknowledged above, I have to
thank Mr. H. H. Cox, Librarian of Lincoln College,
Oxford, for kindly allowing me to reproduce the title-page
of the recently discovered copy in the College library of
the long unknown 1628 edition of Doctor Faustus. My
brother-in-law, Dr. S. G. Owen, has given me helpful
information about the early editions of Ovid’s Amores.
My wife, with whom, as a lover of Marlowe, I would
associate this volume, has lent her aid in the preparation
of the Index. I am once again greatly indebted to the
vigilance of the lynx-eyed Clarendon Press Readers.
Finally, I wish to thank the Delegates of the Press for
proceeding with the publication of this work amidst
war’s alarms. Yet it is perhaps not inappropriate that

PREFACE

viii

this study of Marlowe should appear at a time when we
are witnesses of double-crossing and megalomaniac fury
as rampant as in The Jew of Malta and T amburlaine ,
Will they be material for some Marlowe of the future ?

WIMBLEDON F. S. B.

January^ ig 40

CONTENTS

I. CANTERBURY

I. The Marlowe Family ..... i

II. The King’s School ..... 6

II. CAMBRIDGE

I. Archbishop Parker’s Scholar . . . .10

II . The Privy Council’s Certificate . . .21

III. CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS .... 29

1 . Ovid’s Elegies ...... 29

11 . Lucan’s First Book . . . . .42

'V. DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE ... 49

V. THE FIRST PART OF TAMBURLAINE THE

GREAT 69

/I. THE SECOND PART OF TAMBURLAINE THE

GREAT 88

VH. LIFE IN LONDON loi

1 . The Bradley Affray and Newgate . . . loi

11 . First Charges of Atheism .... 108

VIII. ROBERT POLEY: PLOT AND COUNTERPI.OT,

1585-8 . . . . . . .116

IX. THE JEW OF MALTA 129

Appendix. T. Heyzvood and ^Jhe Jew oj Malta"* . .148

X. THE MASSACRE AT PARIS . . . .151

Appendix. The Collier Leaf of The Massacre at Parts 168

XL EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND . 172

Appendix. I. ^Edward IP and ‘2 and 3 Henry VP . 192

H. 'Edward IP, 'Arden of Fever sham* and

'Solyman and Perseda* . . .198

XH. THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS 203

XIII. MARLOWE’S POEMS 220

I. The Shorter Pieces ..... 220

11 . Hero and Leander ..... 224

CONTENTS

XIV. MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS 236

1 . Greene and Kyd ..... 236

II. Richard Baines’s Note ..... 245

XV. THE ‘ATHEISM’ OF CHOMLEY, RALEIGH, AND

MARLOWE 253

XVI. 30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND . . 265

XVH. THE SURVIVORS 284

XVIIT. MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES . . 294

I. From the Jacobean Age till To-day . . . 294

H. An Attempt at a Summing-up . . . 306

LIST OF PRINCIPAL DOCUMENTS AND EARLY EDITIONS 315
INDEX 329

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Part of a leaf of the Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Buttery
Book for the tenth week after Michaelmas, 1580, containing the
item of iJ. spent by ‘Marlcn’ . . . Facing page 10

Title-page of one of the undated editions of Marlowe’s translation
of Ovid’s Elegies {Amores). From the unique copy of this edition
in the Bodleian Library (Douce 031) . . . Page 28

Title-page of the first edition of Famhurlaine the Great. From the
copy in the Bodleian Library. .... Page 68

Map of Africa in the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum of Ortelius. From
the copy of the 1574 edition in the Bodleian Library

Between pages 90-1

Part of a letter from Thomas Kyd to Sir John Puckering, the I^ord
Keeper, containing allegations against Marlowe. From Harl.

MSS. 6849, f. 218 .... Between pages iio-il

Title-page of the 1628 edition of Doctor Faiistus. From the recently
discovered quarto in the Library of Lincoln College, Oxford Page 202

Title-page of the only edition of Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and
Leander without Chapman’s continuation. From the unique
copy, now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington

Facing page 224

Opening and closing sections of Richard Baines’s Note accusing
Marlowe of Atheism. From Harl. MSS. 6848, flF. 185-6

Facing page 250

Inquisition on the death of Christopher Marlowe taken i June
1593 and returned by William Danby, Coroner of the House-
hold, to Chancery, From the original document in Chancery
Miscellanea, bundle 64, file 8, no, 241 b, now an exhibit in the
Museum of the Public Record Office . Between pages 270-1

k^xtract from the Register of the Church of St. Nicholas, Deptford,
including, among the burial entries for 1 593, ‘Christopher Marlow
slaine by ff rands Ifrezerj the *1* of June’ . . Facing page 277

CANTERBURY

THE MARLOWE FAMILY

As* the fifteenth century was nearing its close there
born in the Bavarian medieval city of Nuremberg,
on 5 November 1494, the cobbler-poet, Hans Sachs. His
life, divided, as has been said, between his last and his lyre,
was prolonged for what was at that time an unusual
span, till 1576. By 1567, according to his own computa-
tion, he had written over 4,000 Meisterlieder^ i>700 tales
and poems, and over 200 dramas, mainly dialogue-pieces
or Shrovetide farces. Three years before this date, in the
English medieval city of Canterbury, there was born to
another shoemaker, John Marlowe, a son, Christopher,
whose life’s measure was to be little more than a third of
that of Sachs, and who, leaving behind him less than a
dozen plays and poems has through them brought im-
perishable reflected glory to the paternal ‘gentle craft’.

It is not, however, as shoemakers that Marlowes first
appear in the Canterbury city records. The name had
even more than the normal quota of variant spellings —
Marlowe, Marlow, Marloe, Mario, Marlen, Marlin, Mar-
lyne, Marlinge, Merlin, Marley, Marlye, Morley, Morle.
In 1414 William Morle, a fuller, became a freeman of the
city by redemption, on payment of ten shillings. In 1438
Simon Morle, a vintner, was similarly admitted. In 1459
Thomas Morle, son of William, and also a fuller, gained the
privilege without payment by virtue of his birth. In 1478
Thomas Marlow, roper, was admitted by redemption.

A fuller, a vintner, and a roper have little in common
with a shoemaker, but John Marley, a tanner, admitted
a freeman by redemption in 1467, introduces into the
record of the Canterbury Marlowes a closely allied trade.
John was followed both as a tanner and a freeman by his

4427 B

2 CANTERBURY

son Richard, who died in 1521, leaving a detailed will
mainly in favour of his only son Christopher, then a
minor. Richard was a man of substance, for the property
which he devised included the tanhouse, the ^principal
tenement’ in which he dwelt, three messuages in North-
lane, and twenty acres of land leased from ‘Sir John
Ffyneux, Knight’.^ There is further evidence at a later
date of connexion between the Marlowe and the Phineaux
families.^

Christopher Marley, the first bearer of the name, died
in 1540, leaving one daughter and his wife, Joan, with
an unborn child who, if a ‘man child’, was to inherit his
dwelling-house and the adjoining ‘Old Hall’ with the
land belonging to it, while the widow was to have tJic
twenty leased acres and, presumably, the tanhouse. There
is no documentary evidence, but it is a reasonable sup-
position that the unborn child of Christopher Marley’s
will was John Marley, or Marlowe, who was to be father
of the second Christopher, the dramatist, and also of a
daughter, Joan, thus carrying on the names of both
grandparents. Moreover, ‘the dates of John Marlowe’s
marriage, business career, and death agree well with the
assumption that he was born in 1540’.^

If the speculation concerning John Marlowe’s genealogy
is correct, it might have been anticipated that he would
continue the trade of tanning in which the family had
been profitably engaged for three generations. But he
took up the allied trade of shoemaking, the tanners and
shoemakers being associated in Canterbury in the same
guild. A recent discovery by John Bakeless proves that
John Marley was enrolled by Gerard Richardson, shoe-
maker and freeman of Canterbury, as an apprentice in
1559-60.^

The usual period of apprenticeship was seven years, but

^ The will Is printed in full in C. F. Tucker Brooke’s Life of Marlowe
(i 93 o)> PP- 83-9*

“ See below, p. no. ^ Tucker Brooke, op. cit., p. 6

^ ‘Marlowe and his Father’, in T.L.S., 2 Jan. 1937.

THE MARLOWE FAMILY 3

John Marlyn, shoemaker, was admitted as a freeman in
1564, on payment of 4.f. id . While still an apprentice he
married on 22 May 1561, in the church of St. George the
Martyr, Catherine Arthur, who seems to have been the
daughter of the Reverend Christopher Arthur, rector of
St. Peter’s, Canterbury, 1550-2. According to local
tradition he brought his bride to a house still standing,
though much renovated, at the corner of St. George’s
Street and St. George’s Lane.

Children were born of the marriage in rapid succession,
and the entries of their baptisms in the St. George’s
Church register and the archdeacon’s transcripts illustrate
some of the various spellings of the family name.

May 21, 1562. Mary, the daughter of John Marlowe.

Feb. 26, 1563/4. Christofer, the son of John Marlow.

Dec. II, 1565. Margarit, the daughter of John Marloe.*

Oct. 31, 1568. — , the son of John Marlow.

Aug. 20, 1569. John, the son of John Marlow.^

July 26, 1570. Thomas, son of John Marie.

July 14, 1571. An, daughter of John Marie.

Oct. 18, 1573. Daretye, daughter of John Marlye.

The register also records the early death of three of
these children. An unnamed daughter of John Marlow,
buried on 28 August 1568, was probably Mary; an un-
named son, buried on 5 November 1568, was apparently
the child christened on the previous 31 October; and
Thomas, also dying in infancy, was buried on 7 August
1570. Six years later the name Thomas was revived in
the family for another son, baptized apparently on
8 April 1576 in St. Andrew’s Church. ^ For between the
births of Dorothy and this second Thomas their father

^ Entered in the transcript, with a difference of date, as ‘Dec. 18, 1566.
IVIarget, daughter of John Marloh

^ Tucker Brooke (op. cit., p. 8) suggests that this is a clerical error for
Jane or Joan, as the baptism of Joan Marlowe (see below, p. 4) is not
recorded, and there is no other mention of a son, John.

^ This is the date in the archdeacon’s transcript. The St. Andrew’s
Church register has 5 Nov. 1567, which must be wrong.

CANTERBURY

had moved his household from St. George’s to a more
central position in St. Andrew’s parish.

Even with the loss of three children, John Marlowe had
six dependent upon him, including four daughters. Pre-
sumably after the manner of Canterbury Marlowes he
prospered in business. But all that is known about him as
a shoemaker is that he was able successively to enrol at
least four apprentices whose names are on record. The
first, in 1567-8, was Richard Umbarffeld. Two others
were Elias Martyn and William Hewes, who, having been
apprentices to John Marlowe, presumably for the normal
seven years, became freemen respectively on 3 July 1583
and 26 April 1594. On 23 December 1594 Hewes was
succeeded in the apprenticeship by Thomas MychelL'

John Marlowe did not follow the proverbial maxim
which bids a shoemaker stick to his last. From 1579
onwards he is found acting, according to an Elizabethan
practice, as a professional bondsman on behalf of couples
seeking marriage licences. On 28 April 1579 John Marlcy
of St. Andrew’s, Cant., shoemaker, became security for
no less a sum than £ 100 .^ He next appears as a bondsman
on 8 February 1588, and thenceforward nearly once a
year till ii August 1604.

But John Marlowe’s connexion with marriages was not
merely professional. His second surviving daughter, Jane
or Joan (if the baptismal entry of 20 August 1569 refers
to her), was only thirteen when she was married in St.
Andrew’s Church on 22 April 1582 to John Moore, a
shoemaker.^ At a later date the Marlowe family again
moved, to a house in the neighbouring parish of St. Mary
Bredman. Here the church register records the marriages

‘ See the particulars given by John Bakeless in T.L.S.^ 2 Jan. 1937.

^ J. JVI. Cowper, Canterbury Marriage Licences, 1st series, 1568-1618,
col. 365.

3 This is the date in the Church register. In the city roster of freemen
admitted by marriage there are two entries relating to the union of John
Moore and Jane or Joan, dated respectively 1583 and 1585. Tucker
Brooke suggests (op. cit., p. 9) that the first entry may have been invalid
owing to the youthfulness of the couple.

THE MARLOWE FAMILY 5

of the three other daughters. On 15 June 1590 Margaret
took to husband John Jordan, a tailor. On 10 June 1593
Ann followed the example of Jane by marrying John
Crawford, a shoemaker. On 19 June 1594 the youngest
daughter, Dorothy, revived an old Marlowe association by
wedding Thomas Cradwell, or Gradwell, a vintner.

Her place in the household was partly taken by her
cousin, Dorothy Arthur, sole survivor when the plague in
August and September 1593 carried off both her parents
and four of their children. She had then come under her
aunt Catherine Marlowe’s roof, and she showed her
gratitude when shortly before her death on 26 August
1597 she left all her goods to this paternal aunt, to the
exclusion of an aunt by her mother’s side.

In his later years, with lighter family responsibilities,
John Marlowe found time for parochial duties. In the
entry of his burial, 26 January 1604/5, in the register of
St. George’s Church, he is called folerk of St. Maries’.
How long he had held this office is not known. But a
recent discovery shows that in 1 591-2 he had signed the
register of St. Mary Brcdman, in the capacity of church-
warden, as Hohn Marley’.* It is therefore evident that
the mark which takes the place of a signature to his
will was not due to illiteracy. This will, drawn up on
23 January 1604/5, is a remarkably brief document. He
directs that he should be buried in the churchyard of
St. George’s parish, where his earlier married life had been
spent, and he leaves all his ‘temporall goods’ to his wife
whom he appoints his sole executrix. In striking contrast
are the detailed provisions of Catherine Marlowe’s own
will, fourteen months later, made on 17 March 1605/6.^

Among other legacies she bequeaths to her eldest sur-
viving daughter, Margaret Jordan, The greatest golde
ringe’; to Ann Crawford ^a golde ringe’ and ‘an other
siluer ringe’ ; to Dorothy Cradwell ‘y® ringe w^^' y^ double

^ John Bakcless in T.L.S., loc. cit.

^ The wills of John Marlowe and of his wife are printed by luckcr
Brooke, op. cit., pp. 93-6.

6 CANTERBURY

posye’. Similarly, the spoons, including the six ‘greatest
siluer spoones’, are divided among her daughters and their
children. The daughters are also each to have two cushions
and to have the use between them of her ‘Christeninge
linnen’. Jane, who had married so early, must have been
dead, for she is not mentioned, but her husband, John
Moore, is left forty shillings and ‘the ioyne presse that
standeth in the greate chamber where I lye’. John
Crawford, the senior son-in-law, is appointed residuary
legatee and executor.

As Catherine Marlowe lingers so solicitously over the
bestowal of her gold and silver rings, her greatest silver
spoons, her tafteta cushions and the rest, is it fanciful to
conjecture that Christopher may in part have inherited
from his mother his eye for ‘seld-scen precious stones’,
for the dazzling blaze and colours of the world ? It is
permissible to catch at even such a slight clue to the sud-
den flov/ering from a prosperous, well-ordered tradesman
stock of a revolutionary poetic genius — as inexplicable a
sport of nature as the emergence in a later age of a Shelley
or a Swinburne from an equally conventional, though far
higher, social environment.

THE KING’S SCHOOL

But of Christopher’s home life not the faintest echo
remains either in tradition or in his writings. The one
institution that links him with Canterbury is the King’s
School, where he entered as a scholar on 14 January
1578/9. This ancient foundation, from time immemorial
attached to the Cathedral, was put on a new basis by
Henry VIII when in 1541 he instituted a collegiate body
to take the place of the monks of Canterbury as con-
trollers of the Cathedral. The capitular statutes con-
tained very precise regulations concerning the school.
There were to be ‘two public teachers of the boys in
Grammar’, i.e. Latin grammar. Their pupils were to be

THE KING’S SCHOOL 7

‘fifty poor boys, both destitute of the help of friends, and
endowed with minds apt for learning, who shall be called
scholars of the grammar school, and shall be sustained out
of the funds of our Church’. These boys were not to be
admitted till they had learnt to read and write and were
moderately versed in the first rudiments of grammar.
They were to be maintained for four, or at most five,
years ‘until they have obtained a moderate acquaintance
with the Latin grammar, and have learned to speak in
Latin and write in Latin’. The age-limits for election
were fixed at nine and fifteen respectively.

It is curious that Christopher was not elected till he
was within a few weeks of the upward limit of age. He
certainly had a mind apt for learning, and though the
son of John Marlowe was not destitute of the help of
friends, the designation of ‘poor boy’ was given a very
elastic interpretation. Each of the scholars received a
yearly stipend of ^l. Ss. 4J., together with allowances
for commons and for a new gown every Christmas, the
total annual payment being ^^4. I'hese payments were
recorded in the accounts of the Treasurer of the Cathe-
dral, which have been preserved for 1578-9. Here appear
the names of the fifty boys who received the quarterly
allowance of one pound. ^ ‘Christopher Marley’ is not
found among them in the first quarter, but in the second
he fills a vacancy caused by the departure of John
Emtley. His place is 47th in the Treasurer’s list, and in
the third and fourth terms 48th and 45th respectively.
The Treasurer’s accounts for 1579-80 arc missing, but
Christopher must have continued to attend the school
and make good use of his time till near the close of the
Michaelmas term 1580, when he went up to Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, and was soon afterwards
elected to a scholarship on Archbishop Parker’s founda-
tion.^

* Facsimile in J. H. Ingram’s Christopher Marlou'e and his Associates
(1904), p. 33. Alphabetical list of scholars in Tucker Brooke, op. cit.,
pp. 19-20, ^ See below, p. 10.

8 CANTERBURY

Marlowe thus spent just under two years at the King’s
School. But on a boy of his exceptional gifts and interests,
in the formative period between fifteen and seventeen,
they must have had a highly important influence. The
curriculum of the school, as has been seen, was fashioned
according to the Renaissance pedagogic ideals, and its
chief aim was to train the scholars to speak and write
Latin fluently. It is one of the purposes of the pages that
follow in this volume to illustrate, more fully than has yet
been attempted, the extent of the classical influences upon
Marlowe’s work. The foundation of his familiarity with
Latin literature and with the mythology of Greece and
Rome must have been laid at the King’s School in 1579--80.

A fiivourite Renaissance method of teaching boys to
speak Latin intelligently was training them to act in
classical or neo-classical plays. Anthony Rushe, head-
master of the King’s School, 1561-5, received from the
Cathedral Chapter ^14. 6 s, Sd. in 1562-3 for ‘setting out
of his plays at Christmas’.^ In the light of the school’s
curriculum some at least of these may be presumed to
have been in Latin. There is no documentary record of
performances under Christopher’s two headmasters, John
Gresshop (1566-80) and Nicholas Goldsborough (1580-4),
nor indeed till the reign of Charles 1 . But whether or
not there was acting by the King’s scholars in 1579-80,
it must have counted for something in Christopher’s
development that his school had a tradition of theatrical
production wliich was favoured by the authorities of the
Cathedral.

Otherwise the Cathedral, and all that it stood for,
seems to have left strangely little impression on him. The
revelation of beauty came to him through the channel of
classical antiquity and not by the way of gothic medieval-
ism. Here again he is linked with Shelley and Swinburne,
both worshippers at the shrines of Greece and Rome, but
the one scorning York Minster as a ‘huge erection of

‘ C. E. Woodruff and H. J. Cape, Schola Regia Cantuariensisy
pp. 79-80.

THE KING’S SCHOOL 9

unreason’,^ the other deaf to the enchantment whispered
from Oxford’s towers.

Thus when Christopher left Canterbury for Cambridge
towards the end of 1580 there is nothing to show that he
ever returned. Recently discovered evidence shows that
he was resident in college when his sister Jane was
married on 22 April 1582.^ By his native townsmen it
might have been said of him, when he took his leave, with
the change of the place-name to Canterbury, that he

came, as most men deem’d, to little good,

But came to Oxford and his friends no more.^

* E. Dowden, Life of Shelley^ p. 89.

^ John Bakcless, Christopher Marlowe, p. 26.

^ Matthew Arnold, Lhe Scholar Cipsy.

4+27

CAMBRIDGE

ARCHBISHOP PARKER’S SCHOLAR

T he first documentary evidence of Christopher Mar-
lowe’s residence in Cambridge, recently discovered,
is the entry in the Buttery books of Corpus Christi College
of a charge to ‘Marlen’ of id. in ‘septimana lo® post
Michael’, i.e. the second week of December 1580.^ It
was a paradoxical academic initiation for one whose
imagination was hereafter to be filled with ‘infinite riches
in a little room’. In the following three weeks he was
more prodigal, and made a number of disbursements in
sums varying from i^d. to \d.

Marlowe was, therefore, in residence at Corpus Christi
during the last four weeks of the first (Michaelmas) term
of the academic year 1580-1. He did not formally
matriculate till near the end of the second (Lent) term, on
17 March 1580/1, when the entry ‘Coll. Corp. Xr.
Chr 5 f. Marlen’ appears in the University Matriculation
Registry in the convictus secundus, i.e. students intermedi-
ate between fellow-commoners and sizars. In the College
Registrum Parvum or Admission Book ‘Marlin’ in the
second term 1580-1 is listed among the Pefisionarii^ being
last but one among the twenty-eight entries during the
year ending 24 March 1580/1.

It is not till the third (Easter) term that there is found
among entries in the Registrum Parvum, dated between
7 and 1 1 May 1581, relating to scholarships at the College,
‘Marlin electus et admissus in locum domini Pashly’.
Marlowe thus officially became a scholarship-holder and
paid the customary fixed fee on his election, for the
Corpus Christi accounts record, ‘Pro introitu in Con-

* John Bakeless, op. cit., p. 72.

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Pan C)( a leaf of ilie Coipib CliiMi Co11ll;(-, Caiiil»i kIl'l, Bulkiv Jiook foi tlic
tenth \\fek after Micluu-liria^, l5''^o, coniainin^ the item of \d spi nt hv 'Al.iileiP,
uIirIi 1 ^, the hrbt docamentar\ record (jf Marlowe’s re^dence at Cainhndee

ARCHBISHOP PARKER’S SCHOLAR u

victum Magistri et Sociorum et Scholarium . . . Marlin
iij® iiij^’. These accounts also record the payment to
‘Marlin’ of twelve shillings in the Lent term, and he
must therefore have been counted as a scholar previous
to his formal election. ‘

The researches of G. C. Moore Smith, supplemented
by those of later investigators, have established the precise
character of Marlowe’s scholarship and the conditions on
which it was held. The learned Matthew Parker, Arch-
bishop of Canterbury (155 8-75), was a generous benefactor
to Corpus Christi College, of which he had been succes-
sively Scholar, Fellow, and Master. In 1567 he founded
three scholarships tenable at the College by boys from
Norwich, and in 1569 five for boys from Canterbury
School, followed by two additional Norwich scholarships.
Finally, by his will made on 5 April 1575, Parker founded
three further scholarships of the value of ^3. 6 s. Sd.
annually:

‘Quorum scholasticorum primum clcctum volo per succcssorcs
meos in Schola Cantuar. & in ea urbe oriundum: Secundum
electum volo e Schola de Aylesham & tertium e Schola de
Wymondham : In hiis duabus villis oriundos.’

The Archbishop died on 17 May and eflPect was im-
mediately given to the above provision in his will, for
in the College accounts for 1575-6 the names are given
of the three scholars elected in accordance with its terms,
Thexton, Poynter, and Pashley, of whom the third was
the one from the King’s School, Canterbury. In an in-
denture made in April 1580 between the Archbishop’s
son, John Parker, and the college authorities, the con-
ditions governing the award of the scholarship were more

* May he also have been so counted during the previous Michaelmas
term or part of it? G. C. Moore Smith who first printed the entries in
the C.C.C. account books {M.L.R., Jan. 1909) noted that ‘Marlin’ had
been entered among the scholars in the first quarter of 1580-1, but had
been crossed out and ‘Pashlye’ written above. As the Buttery book now
proves that Marlowe was in residence in Dec. 1580, may not the original
entry be correct ?

12 CAMBRIDGE

closely defined and John Parker expressly reserved the
nomination to himself.^ He has not yet received due
recognition of his discriminating choice of Christopher
Marlowe, though he had been only two years in the
King’s School, to fill the vacancy caused by the retirement
of the first Canterbury scholar on that particular founda-
tion, Christopher Pashley.

In 1580-1 Pashley had drawn his stipend for nearly
six years, and it would appear that, as in the case of the
Norwich scholars, those appointed under the terms of the
will were elected for three years or for six, if they intended
to be ordained.

The indenture specified that the scholars should have
certain musical qualifications and be well instructed in
their grammar, and ‘if it may be such as can make a
verse’. Christopher could certainly satisfy the last condi-
tion, though the reference is to skill in Latin, not English,
prosody. The three scholars under the terms of the will
were to be lodged in a chamber formerly known as the
Storehouse which had been repaired by John Parker.
Strict regulations were made about residence. They were
not to be absent from college more than one month in
the year except upon College business or ‘through some
notable sicknes’.

The Universities in the sixteenth century were far
from entertaining the modern conception of ‘the Long
Vacation’. Even so it was found impossible to carry out
stringently Parker’s regulations, though in any week that
a scholar was absent he forfeited his allowance of one
shilling. With a full attendance he would receive thirteen
shillings in each of the first three quarters, and fourteen
in the last.^ The entries, therefore, in the college accounts,

* I'he indenture was discovered by John Bakeless in the Corpus Christ!
College archives. Sec Ids Christopher Marlowe^ pp. 47 and 335.

^ It will be seen that the maximum yearly allowance was thus [i. 13/.,
though in his will Archbishop Parker had allowed ^3. 6 s. 6 d. to each
scholar. T'he difference may be accounted for by the fact that the three
scholars had such privileges as ‘their barber and laundry freely without
any thing paying therefor’.

ARCHBISHOP PARKER’S SCHOLAR 13

as G. C. Moore Smith was the first to point out,^ of the
scholarship payments to Marlowe show how long he was
in residence during each term.^ The payments are, in
tabular form, as follows:

Trtnu Trim. Trim. Trim.

1580- 1 Marlin xijs Marlen xiij® Marlcn xi|S

1581- 2 Marlin xiijs Marlin xiij^ Marlin xiij® Marlin vij^

1582- 3 Malyn xij^ Marlin xiij® Marlin vj® Marlin xinj*'

1583- 4 I) Marlyn xij^ D Marlyn xiij® 1 ) Marlyn xiij'^ 1) Marlin xj^

1584- 5 Ds Marlin iijs Ds Marlin vij® Ds Marlin inj^ Ds Marlin

1585- 6 (Accounts missing)

1 586- 7 Ds Marly ix^ Marlye vj^

Marlowe was thus in virtually permanent residence
from his arrival in Cambridge till the fourth term of his
second academic year of which he appears to have missed
exactly half. This is confirmed by the Buttery book, in
which there are no entries of expenditure by him during
the fourth term of 1581-2 in the second to the eighth
weeks inclusive. Similarly, in the third term of his third
year, 1582-3, he was absent about half of it. There are
no entries against liis name in the Buttery book from the
fourth to the ninth weeks inclusive. In his fourth year,
1583-4, he was in almost constant attendance. During
this year, in the second term, he took his B.A. degree. In
the Buttery book for the sixth week after Christmas he
is still merely ‘Marlin’. From tlie seventh week after
Christmas he becomes ‘Dominus Marlin’. In the scholar-
ship accounts he gets the prefix, by courtesy, from the
beginning of the academic year.

The record of Marlowe’s academic attendance for the
first four years is, taken all in all, creditable, and compares
favourably with the similar records of such fellow
scholars as Thomas Lewgar, Thomas Munday, and
William Cockman.^ In his fifth year, 1584-5, the scholar-

* He reproduces, loc. cit., pp. 173-5, the payments to Marlowe and Ids
companion scholars, 1580-1 to 1586-7. Similarly in Tucker Brooke, op.
cit., pp. 27-8.

^ Sec, however, p. 14.

^ See the details of scholarship payments given by Moore Smith and
Tucker Brooke, loc. cit.

14 CAMBRIDGE

ship payments suggest an abrupt change, but here they are
not entirely confirmed by the Buttery book. In Michael-
mas term Marlowe is paid only three shillings, but there
are entries of expenditure by him in the second, third,
fourth, seventh, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth weeks. In
the second term he is paid seven shillings but has entries
against him in nine weeks. In the third term the scholar-
ship accounts and the Buttery book nearly tally, for there
are no entries of expenditure by him from the fifth to the
twelfth weeks inclusive ; and in the fourth term they agree,
for there are no entries against his name for nine of the
fourteen weeks, from the fourth to the twelfth inclusive.

The scholarship accounts for 1585-6 are missing, but
by good fortune the Buttery book for that year is pre-
served — the last extant till the middle of the eighteenth
century. It proves that, except in the third term, Mar-
lowe was in regular attendance throughout his last full
academic year. In the Michaelmas term there are two
weeks without entries and in the second term there are
three weeks. In the third there is only one entry before
the last two weeks of the term. On the other hand,
somewhat surprisingly, he is shown in the fourth term to
have been in attendance every one of the fourteen weeks,
as also in the first three weeks of the Michaelmas term,
1586, after which the Buttery book fails us.

Presumably the Government service upon which Mar-
lowe was for a time employed before taking his M.A.
degree' was after he had become ‘Dominus’. If so, on
the evidence of the Buttery books his only lengthy periods
of absence from Cambridge, if this was involved, were in
the third or fourth terms of 1584-5, or the third of 1585-6.
Otherwise, and this is more probable, the service must
have been rendered after he had ‘gone down’ in or after
the Lent term 1587.

Can it have any bearing on this question that Marlowe’s
weekly expenditure in 1585-6 seems to have been in
excess of any previous period, items from xvmd. to xxi^.

' See below, pp. 22 ff.

ARCHBISHOP PARKER’S SCHOLAR 15

being not infrequent, though even from the first he had by
no means always kept within his scholarship allowance of
one shilling and must have had it supplemented in some
way? Though he began with the humble payment of
li., his life at Corpus was far from one of penury.

In 1587 he had held his scholarship for the maximum
period of six years, on the presumption, as it would seem,
that he intended to take holy orders. He had complied
in the normal way with the University regulations for
students taking the course for the Bachelor of Arts degree.
For this it was technically necessary to have completed
a quadrennium^ or four years’ residence. But difficulties
had arisen because candidates had to pass their final tests
between Ash Wednesday and the Thursday after the
fourth Sunday in Lent. Hence by a decree of 15 February
1578/9 it was ordained that any one who had been en-
rolled ‘before, at, or upon the day when the ordinary
sermon ad clerum is or ought to be made in the beginning
of the Easter term, shall be reputed and accounted to
have wholly and fully satisfied the statute, if he shall
proceed in the fourth Lent next following the said
sermon’.

On this interpretation of the statute Marlowe had
complied with its requirements by Lent 1584, and his
supplicat to be allowed to proceed to the degree is extant,
certificated by Thomas Harris, a Fellow of Corpus.

‘Supplicat Christopherus Marlin lit duodecim termini completi
in quibus ordinarias lectiones audivit (licet non omnino secundum
formam statuti) una cum omnibus oppositionibus responsionibus
caeterisque exercitiis per statuta regia requisitis sufficiant ei ad
respondendum quaestioni.’

His college tutor thus guaranteed that Marlowe had
satisfactorily performed the public exercises in which he
propounded certain philosophical theses and attacked
others. In the University Grace Book ‘Christof. Marlyn’
appears second in a list of twelve Corpus Christi College
undergraduates admitted to the degree, and in the ‘Ordo
Senioritatis’ Marlowe is 199th among 231.

i6 CAMBRIDGE

What were the ^ordinary lectures’ attended by Marlowe,
and what were his academic studies i There is only one
piece of documentary evidence. In a list dated 29 October
1581 ‘Merling’ is one of the Corpus Christi College
undergraduates (among them being his fellow scholars
Lewgar and Munday) in the class of ‘Mr. Johnes, pro-
fessor lecturae dialecticae’.^ It was the combination of
the ratiocinative and the imaginative faculties in Marlowe
that was to be the distinctive note of his genius. He would,
therefore, at any time have been a keen student of logic.
But at this period the subject was exciting special interest
and controversy in Cambridge, where the University was
torn between the adherents of the traditional Aristotelian
system and the followers of the heretical Parisian pro-
fessor, Petrus Ramus. Echoes of these academic debates
were to be strangely mingled in Massacre at Paris with
the cries of the victims on the eve of St. Bartholomew.^
And in the opening scene of Doctor Faustus where the
chief subjects of the curriculum are passed in review the
definition of the aim of logic

Bene disserere est finis logices
is taken from the Dialectica of Ramus. ^

In the Cambridge atmosphere of his day a student with
so restlessly inquiring a mind as Marlowe would thus not
have been content to ‘live and die in Aristotle’s works’.
But that he was familiar with many of the Stagirite’s
writings, at any rate in their Latin dress, is shown by
his references to the Analytics and the Organon, by his
adapted quotations from other of his works and the
allusion to the doctrine of ov Kal fxr) ov.+

From metaphysical speculation it was a natural transi-
tion to the more concrete problems of cosmology. How

* See also below, p. 31.

^ See below, pp. 159^0.

3 Editions of tliis work had been published in London by T. VautroUier
in 1576 and by T. Thomas at Cambridge in 1584.

In A. H. Bullen’s convincing emendation of the 1604 quarto ‘Oncay-
maeon’ in Doctor Faustus, i. i. 12.

ARCHBISHOP PARKER’S SCHOLAR 17

‘ravished’ Marlowe was with these and how they come
breaking, appropriately or otherwise, into his dramatic
and poetic work will appear in the discussion of the plays
and poems. Cosmology was allied on the one hand with
astronomy, in its Ptolemaic phase, and on the other with
geography as set forth in the Theatrum Orbis ^ err arum of
Ortelius which so profoundly influenced him.^

Of medical science he knew, at any rate, enough to be
well versed in contemporary concepts of psychology and
physiology.^ Law is stigmatized by Faustus as a study fit
only for ‘a mercenary drudge’, and though he need not
here be speaking for Marlowe, his quotations from
Justinian’s Institutes are inaccurate, and there is a notable
absence in his works of the legal phraseology so abundantly
used by Shakespeare and other Elizabethan dramatists.
On the other hand, detailed investigation into the
sources of his plays has shown Marlowe to have been a
diligent and close student of history, as he found it in
the annals of Turkish and Scythian affairs and in French
and English chronicles. ^

But however ardently Marlowe’s intellect roamed
through other fields of study it was by classical poetry and
legend that he was enthralled and inspired. They were
the magic casements through which this young English-
man, a tradesman’s son and a churchman’s protegd, was
to gaze upon the mundane spectacle and see it gloriously
transfigured. And this was achieved, so far as can be
judged, without his having direct access to the noblest
and purest products of classical genius. Though ‘Homer’s
Iliads’ loom large before Marlowe, there is no clear
evidence that he had read the Greek epics in the original,

^ See below, pp. 88 and 91.

^ See ‘Marlowe and Elizabethan Psychology’, by C. Camden, jr.,
Phil. Quarterly, Jan. 1629.

^ See especially Una Ellis- Fermor’s edition of T amburlaine, pp. 26-50,
and Ethel Seaton, ‘Marlowe and his Authorities’, T.L.S., 16 June 1921,
and ‘Fresh Sources for Marlowe’, R.E.S., Oct. 1929. Bakeless, op. cit.,
pp. 60-4, discusses some of the books available to Marlowe in the Uni-
versity or C.C.C. libraries.

4427

i8 CAMBRIDGE

that he had made ‘blind Homer sing to’ him in his own
majestic tones. Of the glories of Attic tragedy' there is
not the faintest echo throughout his work. And when he
borrowed the theme of his Hero and Leander from a
Greek versifier of the fifth century a.d., he probably
made use of the Latin version which had opportunely
appeared in 1587.^ And even when Faustus quotes texts
from St. Paul’s and St. John’s Epistles they are not in
the Hellenistic Greek of the New Testament but in the
Latin of ‘Jerome’s Bible’, the Vulgate. ^

Without denying that Marlowe during his six years’
residence at Cambridge may have acquired the elements
of Greek, there can be no doubt that to him as to nearly
all English humanists of his time, except a select group
of scholars and divines, the revelation of the antique
world came through the literature of Rome. And to
Marlowe the pre-eminent source of this revelation was
Ovid — not only in the AmoreSy of which his translation
may even have dated from his Cambridge days, but in
such storehouses of myth and legend as the Metamorphoses^
the Fastiy and the Heroides. The peculiar influence of
Ovid on Marlowe is discussed later in detail. ^ Here it is
enough to say that in the elegist who romanticized so
much that was august or primitive in the mythology and
annals of Greece and Rome the young English poet found
a genius in many points akin to his own. Only second was
the attraction for him of Virgil to whom his debt extends
well beyond the confines of DidOy Queen of Carthage, And
between the singer of the Aeneid and Lucan, whose first
Book of the De Bello Civili Marlowe translated, there was
for the humanists of his day no such gap as separates for
us the poets of the golden and the silver ages of Latinity.
Indeed, for him the corpus of Latin literature would
include the medieval and neo-classic annalists and bio-
graphers who furnished him with materials for Tambur-

* See below, p. 227.

^ Doctor Faustusy i. i. 38, ‘Jerome’s Bible, Faustus, view it well’, and 11 .
39-41. ^ See below, pp. 29-42.

ARCHBISHOP PARKER’S SCHOLAR 19

laine. And he himself, if we may rely on the reported
testimony of a Kentish and (approximately) Cambridge
contemporary, Simon Aldrich, practised the neo-classic
poetic art. Aldrich, a member of a Canterbury family,
matriculated at Trinity College about 1593, graduated
B.A. in 1 596-7, and later became a Fellow. He ultimately
became a tenant and neighbour of Henry Oxindcn, a
collector of plays and writer of commonplace-books, near
Canterbury. Oxinden notes on 10 February 1640 that
‘Mr. Aldrich saies that Marloe . . . was a rare scholar
and made excellent verses in Latin’. ^ But he has left
nothing in that language which could be dated from his
Cambridge days.

To what extent then or later Marlowe became familiar
with the languages derived from Latin is difficult to say.
Though ‘Machiavel’ speaks the prologue to ^he Jew of
Maltdy Marlowe’s conception of his doctrines does not
seem to be based upon the Florentine’s own writings but
on Gentillet’s French counterblast Contre N. Machiavel
(1576). The relation between Orlando Furioso, xxvii-xxix,
and two scenes in F amburlaine^ Part H (iii. iv and iv. ii), is
not sufficiently intimate necessarily to imply first-hand
knowledge of Ariosto’s epic, of which Harington’s transla-
tion was not published till 1591. In this episode and
elsewhere Marlowe appears to have used Belleforest’s
Cosmographie Universelle, In Act ii. i of The Jew of
Malta two lines of Spanish are introduced (39 and 64), but
of the Romance languages there is little doubt that it was
French of which Marlowe had the best working knowledge.

But however wide the range of his studies in arts and

* Oxinden’s memoranda about Marlowe are contained in his common-
place books, one of which is in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washing-
ton, and the other in the British Museum (Add. MSS. 28012). They were
also noted in the fly-leaf of a copy of the 1629 Hero and Leander, which was
in the Heber Library, and were summarized by J. P. Collier before the
sale of the library in 1834. Collier’s evidence was suspect and the quarto
has now disappeared. But the discovery of Oxinden’s commonplace-books
has established the genuineness of the memoranda. 5 ee ‘Marlowe in
Kentish Tradition,’ by Mark Eccles, N. ^ Q., 13, 20, 27 July, 24 Aug. 1935.

20 CAMBRIDGE

sciences Marlowe as a six-year scholar apparently destined
to take holy orders must have been supposed to give the
first place to divinity in his academic curriculum. For the
common use of his Norwich scholars Parker had provided
a number of books chained in one of the chambers set
apart for their residence.* These included, in addition
to classical lexicons and thesauri and a history of Cam-
bridge,

Textus Bibliae cum Gloss. Lyrac in quatuor Voluminibus.

Novum Testamcntum Graecum, cum Versionibus Vulgat. &
Erasmi.

Paraphrasis Erasmi super Novum Testament, in duobus Volu-
minibus Latine.

Concordantiae Bibliorum.

This small and specialized chained library is sufficient
evidence of the direction in which the Archbishop in-
tended that the studies not only of the Norwich but of
all his other scholars should mainly move. Even if Mar-
lowe, like Faustus, was afterwards to bid ^divinity adieu’,
it is surprising that there are not more echoes in his
writings of his long years of theological apprenticeship.
Apart from the quotations from the Vulgate in Doctor
Faustus they are almost entirely confined to some Scrip-
tural references by Barabas, of which the most specific
is in Fhejew of Malta, i. ii. 182-6, to the first chapter
of the Book of Job.

Thus, like many another youthful genius from his day to
ours, Marlowe gave his intellectual bent a free rein outside
the prescribed course of studies. Probably he did so in-
creasingly after taking his B.A. degree Yet in the three
years that followed he again fully satisfied the require-
ments of the academic authorities. His supplicat for the
M.A. degree is in the ordinary form and is signed by the
Master of his College as well as by a Fellow.

‘Supplicat revcrentijs vestris Christopherus Marley vt nouem
termini complcti (post finalem eius determinationem) in quibus

* Moore Smith, loc. cit., p. 170, quoting from Strype’s Life of Parker,
p. 291.

ARCHBISHOP PARKER’S SCHOLAR 21

lectiones ordinarias audiuit (licet non omnino secundum formam
statuti) vna cum omnibus oppositionibus, responsionibus cetcrisquc
exercitijs per statuta regia requisitis sufficiant ei ad incipiendum
in artibus. Robcrtus Norgate

Henricus Ruse, praelector’.

The ‘grace’ was granted in respect of ‘Chr. Marlcy’, to-
gether with his fellow scholar Thomas Lewgar and five
other members of Corpus Christi College, on 3 1 March i 87
and in the order of seniority ‘Marley’ ranks as 65 th. Up to
this date there is no evidence to suggest that Marlowe
during his Cambridge career had given any offence to cither
the College or the University authorities. Any allegations
that he had provoked them by mutinous conduct or
subversive opinions are purely speculative and arc infer-
ences from later events. All seemed clear for him to take
the M.A. degree at the ‘Commencement’ in July. But
before that date strange things were to happen.

THE PRIVY COUNCIL’S CERTIFICATE

The last scholarship payment to Marlowe, as has been
seen, was in the Lent term 1586/7, when he drew vr. v]d.
It would be natural for a successor to be appointed as
soon as possible to the vacancy. But it is not till 10 Novem-
ber 1587 that the College Registrum Parvum has the
entry ‘Bridghman ele[c]tus et admissus in locum dominj
Marley’. The College Order Book dates his election con-
siderably later, on 27 April 1588:

‘Jacobus Bridgman electus ct admissus est discipulus hujus
Collegij in locum Cantuariensis scholaris vacantem quia M.
Parker secundum ordinationem Domini Archiepiscopi patris sui
alium ad supplendum locum prcdictum tempore constitute ad
collegium non miserit.’

There is a third discrepancy, because in the College
accounts Bridgeman appears as paying the customary
fee of iijj. m]d, on election during the year ending

22 CAMBRIDGE

Michaelmas 1587. G. C. Moore Smith, who published
these entries from the Corpus Christ i archives in 1909,^
therefore suggested that 1588 in the Order Book entry
might be a mistake for 1 587, though there would still be a
discrepancy with the Registrum Parvum. But it seems
unlikely that such an otherwise precise entry would be
misdated by a year, and it looks as if the College had
waited for some time to give John Parker his option of
nominating to the vacancy. Moreover, there was a reason
unknown to Moore Smith in 1909 which may have
delayed the choice of a successor to Marlowe. But he
pointed out that the Order Book entry omitted Marlowe’s
name, though in a formula of admission it was usual
that the name of the last holder of the scholarship
should be mentioned. And he shrewdly raised the ques-
tion whether Marlowe when his successor was elected was
in some way in bad odour with the College authorities.

To this question an unexpected answer was to be given
in 1925 by Leslie Hotson when he drew attention to
the following entry in the Privy Council Register under
the date 29 June 1587, when the Archbishop of Canter-
bury, the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Treasurer (who was
Chancellor of the University of Cambridge), the Lord
Chamberlain, and ‘Mr. Comptroler’ were present :

‘Whereas it was reported that Christopher Morley was determined
to hauc gone beyond the seas to Reames and there to remaine
Their Lordships thought good to certefie that he had no such
intent, but that in all his accions he had behaued him selfe orderlie
and discrcetlie wherebie he had done her Majestic good service,
& descrued to be rewarded for his faithfull dealinge : Their Lord-
ships request that the rumor thereof should be allaied by all
possible mcanes, and that he should be furthered in the degree he
was to take this next Commencement: Because it was not her
Majesties pleasure that anie one emploied as he had been in matters
touching the benefitt of his Countrie should be defamed by those
that are ignorant in th’ affaires he went about.

^ Loc. cit., pp. 175-6.

^ See The Death of Christopher Marlowe, pp. 58-9.

THE PRIVY COUNCII/S CERTIFICATE 23

If the Christopher Morley here mentioned was the
Christopher Marley of the King’s School and the later
Cambridge entries, it is evident that he had got into
trouble with the University authorities after the signing
of his ‘supplicat’, and that the Privy Council’s interven-
tion was necessary to obtain permission for him to proceed
to his M.A. If this be so, the Council’s action had im-
mediate results, for Marlowe took the degree in July.

The episode is so unusual and apparently out of relation
to the dramatist’s previous Cambridge career that Hot-
son’s identification of this Christopher Morley has been
questioned, and the problem has proved to be more com-
plex than he thought. He knew of one other Cambridge
Christopher Morley who had to be considered. This
Morley was a scholar of Trinity, who took his B.A. in
1582/3. As, however, he proceeded to his M.A. in 1586 he
cannot be the man on whose behalf the Privy Council
intervened a year later.

It was natural for Hotson to conclude that this Christo-
pher Morley of Trinity was the Christopher Marlor
mentioned in a letter to the Privy Council by William
Vaughan, written from Pisa on 14 July 1602, ‘to forewarn
the Council of certain caterpillars, I mean Jesuits and
seminary priests, who are to be sent from the English semi-
nary at Valladolid to pervert and withdraw her Majesty’s
loyal subjects from their due obedience to her. . . .

‘In the said seminary there is one Christopher Marlor
(as he will be called) but yet for certainty his name is
Christopher, sometime master in arts of Trinity College
in Cambridge, of very low stature, well set, of a black
round beard, not yet priest, but to come over in the
mission of the next year ensuing.’^

But in this identification Hotson, it has since been
proved, was mistaken. There were two, not one, Christo-
pher Morleys or Marlowes at Trinity, Cambridge, in the
later years of Elizabeth’s reign.

Sir Israel Gollancz, in a letter to Times^ 23 June
* Hotson, op. cit., pp. 60-1.

24 CAMBRIDGE

1925, drew attention to the fact that, in a document then
belonging to Messrs. DobeU, this seminarist Christopher
Marlowe is mentioned. The document consists of twenty
large folio sheets containing the original bills rendered by
the keepers of the Gatehouse Prison, Westminster, for the
diet and other necessaries of prisoners from 1596 to
1606. On the sheet containing the bills from 25 June 1604
to 23 Sept. 1604 the following entry is found:

Committed by Christopher Marlowe alias Mathews, a semi-
my Lordc Chiefe nary preist owith for his dyet & lodging for 7
Justice weeks, and two days being close prisoner at the

rate of 14® the weeke 5^^ 2® For washinge 2® 4^

...^5. 4’ 4".

Sir Israel was right in identifying this ‘Marlowe alias
Mathews’ with the Marlor mentioned by Vaughan. But
he was mistaken, as has been since proved, in going on to
identify him also with the Christopher Morley ‘in further-
ance of whose degree, the Privy Council drew up the
certificate in 1587’ — in which case, of course, there would
have been no question of its referring to Marlowe the
dramatist. A month later, in a letter to The Times ^
24 July, J. B, Whitmore from inquiries made at Valladolid
was able to show that the seminarist could not have been
alluded to in the Privy Council entry. The records of the
English College show that on 30 May 1599 there was
admitted to the college John Matthew (Mathews) alias
Christopher Marler, aged twenty-seven, born and edu-
cated at Cambridge where he spent seven years at Trinity
College, and had taken his B.A. and M.A. He was con-
verted by Father Thomas Wright, and received into the
Roman Catholic Church by Father Garnett, S.J., and had
been imprisoned in the Clink for fifteen days before he
left England.

From the University records it appears that this John
Mathews came up to Trinity from Westminster School
in Michaelmas 1588 (when he was about sixteen), took his
B.A. in 1592/3 and his M.A. in 1596. He was therefore

THE PRIVY COUNCIL’S CERTIFICATE

still at Westminster when the Privy Council certificate was
issued. He was consecrated priest in September 1602, and
was sent back to England in the spring of 1603. It was he
who, as the documents concerning the Gatehouse Prison
show, was arrested in the summer of 1604, and was after-
wards deported.

Thus the progress of investigation since Hotson’s book
was published, while it has corrected details in his views,
has gone far to confirm his main conclusion that the
Christopher Morley on whose behalf the Privy Council
intervened was the Morley or Marlowe of Corpus Christ!
College, and that he had been engaged on some govern-
ment service, probably in the period between Lent and
June 1587. For this service he had been ‘defamed by
those that are ignorant in th’ affaires he went about’.
This defamation Hotson interpreted vaguely, ‘by turning
the Council’s language inside out’, as a report that ‘he
was disorderly in his behaviour and indiscreet in his
actions’. He here missed the full significance of part of
his own discovery. The key is in the opening words of the
entry in the Council’s register: ‘Whereas it was reported
that Christopher Morley was determined to haue gone
beyond the seas to Reames and there to remaine Their
Lordships thought good to certefie that he had no such
intent.’ For ‘busy tongues’ to give out (in Hotson’s para-
phrase) that ‘he was to go to Rheims for a protracted stay’
is not on the face of it a damning allegation. But let us
turn for illumination to Part 1 oi The Return from Par-
nassus^ V. iii. 1585-6. Here the two Cambridge scholars,
Studiosus and Philomusus, in despair of making a living
at home decide to fly to foreign climes, ‘to Rome or
Rheims’, apparently in the hope of being rewarded by the
Roman Catholic Church as fugitives from England and
likely converts. Was not this the sting in the allegation ?
Did not Marlowe’s enemies suggest in 1587, as they did
afterwards in 1593, that he had leanings towards Roman
Catholicism, almost as deadly a charge at the time as the
later alternative accusation against him of atheism ?

4427

26 CAMBRIDGE

Rheims and Rome had taken the place of Douai and
Louvain as the head-quarters of English Roman Catholics
on the Continent. The English College at Douai,
founded hy the Pope at his own expense, had been closed
by the new governor of the city and province in March
1578, and its members had to take refuge at Rheims. The
importance attached by the Holy See to the welfare of the
college in its new home is shown in a letter from the Papal
Secretary of State to the Nuncio in France, dated 19 May
1578. After mentioning the expulsion from Douai he
continues:

‘And whereas Dr. Allen, Rector of that College, a man most
exemplary and good and learned, has thereby been constrained to
withdraw with his comrades to the city of Reims in that realm,
therefore it has seemed good to the Pope that they make their
abode there to continue their work: and so, while providing them
with money, he has warmly commended them to the Cardinal of
Reims and the Chapter of the said church, that they may be
accorded all needful aid and favour. And as it is feared that the
pretended Queen of England who shows herself most ill disposed
towards the said Dr. Allen will do her utmost with His Most
Christian Majesty to procure his and his comrades’ expulsion from
the realm of Phance, even as they have been expelled from the
province of Flanders, his Holiness has charged me to write to you
bidding you to exhort and beseech his said Majesty not only to
allow them to abide in the realm and in that city of Reims, but
also to direct that they be well treated, and accorded the favour
of residing there in security and peace of mind, whereby his
Majesty, besides sharing in the merit of so worthy a wish, will do
a thing in the last degree acceptable to the Pope.’^

The French King complied with the Pope’s wishes and
the College at Rheims became the head-quarters of the
English Catholics who were constantly plotting the in-
vasion of England and the dethronement of its ‘pretended
Queen’. A large number of Catholic scholars from Cam-
bridge took refuge there between 1580 and 1592. ^ The

* Calendar of State Papers relating to English affairs, preserved princi-
pally at Rome, vol. ii, 1572-8, p. 435, ed. J. M. Rigg (1926).

^ Interesting details of this migration are given by Austin K. Gray in

THE PRIVY COUNCIL’S CERTIFICATE 27

year 1587, which saw the execution of Mary, Queen of
Scots, on 8 February, and the expedition of Drake to
singe the King of Spain’s beard in April, was a profoundly
disturbed period at home and abroad. The government
secret service was exceptionally active and some one in
authority who had recognized Marlowe’s remarkable
powers entrusted him with some kind of confidential
commission to which the Privy Council’s letter studiously
refers in vague terms. If it brought him, even by way of
espionage, into contact with Catholic recusants the
rumour might easily be spread and accepted that he was
intending to join them in their principal continental
centre. The career of Robert Poley shows how equivocal
could be the position, in a tense and suspicious atmosphere,
of a far more experienced government agent than Marlowe.

The College authorities may now also have been
legitimately prejudiced against the scholar who had en-
joyed the Archbishop’s bounty for the full six years and
was then turning his back upon the clerical career. A
contemporary reference, that does not name the play but
that seems to be otherwise decisive, establishes the fact
that both Parts of Tamburlaine the Great had been written
and produced by 10 November 1587 by the Lord Ad-
miral’s company in London. ^ Hence Marlowe, abandon-
ing the pulpit for the stage, must have hurried, after his
M.A. supplicat was signed, from Cambridge to the capital.
And as part of his time before the end of June seems to
have been occupied in the Queen’s service he must have
written the two Tamburlaine plays rapidly. Indeed, he
may have begun the first Part while he was still in resi-
dence in Corpus Christi. We are thus brought up against
the problem of how far, and in what fashion, Marlowe
had ‘commenced author’ in his Cambridge days.

‘Some Observations on Marlowe as a Government Agent,’ in Pub. Mod.
Lang. Assoc. Amer., Sept. 1928. But his views on the nature of Marlowe’s
service are highly speculative.

* See below, p. 71.

Oulds Elegies:

Three Tookes,

By C. Me

Bpigrameshy L !D*

At Micldleboufgh,

Ill

CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

OVID’S ELEGIES

N O work bearing Marlowe’s name was published, so
far as is known, during his lifetime. The two Parts
of Tamburlaine appeared anonymously in 1590 and 1592.
Edward II was first published in 1594, and in the same
year there was the only edition of Dido^ Queen of Carthage,
Marlowe’s uncompleted Hero and Leander was issued in
1598 and was republished in the same year with Chap-
man’s continuation. The First Book of Lucan appeared
in 1600. The first extant edition of Doctor Faustus dates
from 1604, and The Jew of Malta survives only in the
1633 quarto. The Massacre at Paris and the six editions
of OviPs Elegies are undated.

The publishers thus give little help in determining the
chronology of Marlowe’s writings. For some of them
additional evidences of dates may be gathered from
entries in the Stationers’ Register or in Henslowe’s
Diarjj from contemporary allusions or from internal
references to historical events and indications of source.
These will be discussed in connexion with the individual
works. But for the poems, especially the translation of
Ovid’s AmoreSy we are dependent almost entirely upon
the more impalpable evidences of style and metre.

Marlowe’s translation of the A mores in all the editions
is accompanied by Sir John Davies’s Epigrams, The only
mention of the work in the Stationers’ Register is its
inclusion among books to be publicly burnt by an order
of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Lon-
don on I June 1599.^ The book was unlicensed and the
imprint of Middleburgh (in Holland) on the title-pages
as the place of publication was in all probability spurious.

* Arber, I runs crip of Stationers^ Register, iii, pp. 677-8.

30 CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

Four of the editions contain All Ovids Elegies: 3. Bookes,
(with the variant, Quids Elegies: Three Bookes). By C. M.
Epigram{e)s by 1 . (J.) D. Two others, entitled Epgrammes
and Elegies^ by I. (J)D. and C. M., present Certaine of Ovids
Elegies., with the full name, C. Marlow, on a second title-
page. The selection contains Book I, i, ii, iii, v-xiii, xv ; Book
n, iv and x ; Book III, vi and xiii, and was evidently designed
to include a number of the more erotic among the Elegies.

It is to be presumed that copies of the offending volume
(whether the selection or one containing the ‘3 Books’)
were burnt as soon as possible after publication. If so,
Nashe must have seen the work, or part of it, in manu-
script when in 1594, in Jack Wilton, he quoted two
salacious lines, ii. iii, 11 . 3-4, in Marlowe’s rendering. It
is much more doubtful, I think, whether Shakespeare had
read the line, ‘The moon sleeps with Endymion every
day’, I. xiii, 1 . 43, when he makes Portia cry (M. of V en.,
V. i. 109-10):

Peace, ho! The moon sleeps with Endymion,

And would not be awaked.

The story of the love of Luna for Endymion was familiar,
and the contexts of the two passages are entirely different.
Portia bids the music cease not to disturb the goddess and
her beloved. Ovid bids Aurora find a young partner for
her bed like Endymion instead of the aged Tithonus.

In any case the references of Nashe and Shakespeare
are both after Marlowe’s death and do not help to date
a work which it is natural to refer to an early period in
his career. A translation of the Amores might well sug-
gest itself to a Cambridge student with a natural gift for
writing verse. The venture, as has often been pointed
out, has defects of scholarship and style which are marks
of immaturity. But, as I endeavour to show, its counter-
balancing merits and its importance in Marlowe’s develop-
ment have not been sufliciently recognized.

It will be remembered that there is documentary
evidence of Marlowe having been in October 1581, early

OVID’S ELEGIES 31

in his second academical year, as member of a class in
dialectic.^ In the first play of the Cambridge Tarnassus’
trilogy, ^he Pilgrimage to Parnassus y acted in or near the
Christmas season, 1598-9, a St. John’s College dramatist
represents the two students, Philomusus and Studiosus,^
after passing through the lands of Logic and Rhetoric,
as being beguiled by the voluptuary Amoretto to pervert
poetry into the instrument of sensual passion. We are
probably doing the youthful Marlowe no wrong when
we find, in part, an illustration of a similar academic
‘rake’s progress’ in his choice of the Amores for rendering
into English verse. Ovid had already found gifted six-
teenth-century translators. Arthur Golding’s version of
the first four Books of the Metamorphoses in 1565 had been
followed in 1567 by the complete fifteen Books. In the
latter year George Turberville had published his transla-
tion of the HeroideSy and in 1572 appeared Thomas
Churchyard’s version of the first three Books of the
Tristia, The ‘unbaptized rhymes’ of Marlowe’s rendering
of the Amores were the offspring of a more frankly wanton
Muse.

But it would be a mistake to over-emphasize this aspect
and not to realize that the poem had many-sided attrac-
tions for an enthusiastic lover of antiquity. In the
dedicatory epistle to his translation of the Ilcroides
Turberville speaks of ‘the learned Poet Ovid’. And the
epithet is equally applicable to him in respect of the
Amores. The poem is no undiluted series of erotic
imaginings. It is, in part, an antiquarian and mythological
handbook. When Ovid bids his mistress visit his birth-
place, Sulmo (ii. xvi), he draws an attractive picture of
a rural retreat, with its streams and olives and vines.
When he accompanies her to a race-course (iii. ii) he
re-creates before our eyes the processional ritual and the
fevered excitement of the contest between the charioteers.
In III. X he deplores the abstinence paradoxically associ-
ated with the festival of Ceres; and in iii. xiii he lingers
* See above, p. 16, ^ See above, p. 25.

32 CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

lovingly over the details of the sacrifices and glittering
pageant of Juno’s festival.

Even in the more lusciously amatory elegies the pages
overflow with mythological allusions that ‘may make us
less forlorn’, and lift us out of the cloyingly sensuous atmo-
sphere. In remorse that he has struck his mistress (i. vii)
he bethinks himself of Ajax butchering the flocks and
Orestes taking vengeance on his mother, and he likens the
girl herself to Atalanta, Ariadne, or Cassandra. When she
sets forth on a voyage (ii. xi) he bids her beware of the
perils from Scylla and Charybdis and the Syrtes. When
a snow-swollen stream bars his progress to her (iii. vi [v]
he reproaches it with a roll-call of rivers who have been
victims of love. Her preference of a wealthy rival (iii.
viii [vii]) recalls how Jove had to turn himself into a golden
shower to win Danae and how in the Saturnian age metals
were still hidden in the earth.

And mythology is skilfully turned to another use when
in the opening canto Ovid accuses Cupid of usurping
the role of the Muses and forcing him to sing love-songs
in elegiac couplets of six and five feet instead of sounding
forth deeds of arms in hexameters. And similar imagery
recurs when he tells his friend the epic poet Macer
(ii. xviii) how the God of Love defeated his further
attempt to become a writer of tragedy (11. 13-16) :

Sceptra tamen sumpsi, curaque tragoedia nostra
Crevit, et huic operi quamlibet aptus cram.

Risk Amor pallamque meam pictosque cothurnos
Sceptraque privata tarn cito sumpta manu.

Yet the successful writer of verse in any form — (i. xv)
from Homer and Hesiod to Virgil and Tibullus — is
assured of an immortality denied to the soldier, the
lawyer, and the politician. Thus when the body of Tibullus
(ni. ix [viii]) has ascended the funeral pyre, with Cupid
as chief mourner, his spirit will abide in the Elysian vale.
And so, as in his closing lines he bids his own elegies fare-

* Marlowe omits ni. iv. of modern texts and his numbering thus
differs.

OVID’S ELEGIES 33

well, before undertaking graver themes, Ovid prays that
they may live on after he is no more.

Such reflections and aspirations must have stirred
responsive chords in the breast of the young English poet,
preparing to try his wings, and interested from the first
in metrical experiment. He too, before donning the robe
and buskin of tragedy, was dallying in this version of the
A mores with a more sportive muse. And he had at once
to decide how he could most fittingly reproduce Ovid’s
elegiac couplets in the vernacular. Golding had given
himself some additional elbow-room by rendering the
hexameters of the Metamorphoses into ‘fourteeners’.
Throughout the whole 12,000 lines he never deviated from
this jog-trot, lumbering metre.

Turberville took a freer hand in his translation of the
4,000 lines of the Heroides, Each line of the original, the
alternate hexameter and pentameter of the elegiac couplet,
is represented, as a rule, by two lines in his version. But
he varies his metres. Eighteen epistles are rendered into
four-line stanzas, rhyming in the second and fourth lines.
In six of these the lines contain alternately four and three
feet; in twelve the first, second, and fourth lines contain
three feet, and the third line has four. The other six of
the twenty-four epistles are turned into blank verse. Tur-
berville is thus entitled to the credit of a metrical experi-
menter. Churchyard, on the other hand, in his version
of the Tristia returned to Golding’s fourteeners, which,
though they might pass in the rendering of the hexameters
of the Metamorphoses, are in our eyes to-day singularly ill
suited to reproduce the elegiac couplet. But Golding,
Turberville, and Churchyard all hit the taste of their
own age, and before Marlowe left Cambridge three or
four editions of their several translations had appeared.

One or other of these may have fallen into Marlowe’s
hands, but there is no evidence, as with Shakespeare’s debt
to Golding,^ to prove it. In any case he was not influenced

* See ‘Ovid and Shakespeare’s Sonnets,’ in Elizabethan and other Essays^
by Sidney Lee.

4427

34 CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

by any of his predecessors when he decided to translate
the J mores into five-foot rhyming couplets. They had
all chosen metres which gave opportunity for expanding
the original. Marlowe, on the other hand, replaced the
eleven feet of the Latin elegiac couplet by ten, which was
a handicap in translating from a synthetic into an analytic
language.

In a curious epilogue to his version of the Heroides
Turberville had warned ‘the captious sort of sycophants’
of the difficulties that confronted translators from Latin
into English.

For though the thing but slender be in sight,

And vaine to viewe of curious carping skull,

In mother tongue a forraine speeche to write:

Yet he shall find he hath a Crow to pull
That undertakes with well agreeing File
Of Pmglish verse to rub the Romaine stile.

Devises of the language divers are

Well couched words and feately forged phrase,

Eche string in tunc, no ragged rime doth jarre,

With figures fraught their bookes in every place :

So that it is a worke of prayse to cause
A Romaine borne to speake with English jawes.

How far does Marlowe’s version of the Amoves deserve
the commendation of being ‘a work of prayse’? It is a
question that has been variously answered and that re-
quires closer consideration than it has always received. In
the first place it has to be noted that in an age when the
translator had a much wider licence than to-day Mar-
lowe sought conscientiously to render every line of the
Latin text into its English equivalent. This fidelity to his
original in what is presumably one of his earliest under-
takings is significant for his whole career. For however
revolutionary his opinions may have been, all recent in-
vestigation has helped to show that in his poetic and
dramatic work he kept close to such sources as he used.

Thus in his edition of Marlowe’s Poems published in
1931 L. C. Martin did a signal service to his reputation

OVID’S ELEGIES 35

by proving that a large number of apparent mistransla-
tions in Ovid^s Elegies are renderings not of the modern
text of the A mores but of readings in sijcteenth-century
editions. What seem in a considerable number of other
instances to be inaccuracies are accounted for by changes
in the meaning of words since the Elizabethan period.
And the compression due to Marlowe’s choice of the
five-foot couplet, or the necessities of rhyming, produced
inversions and other obscurities of phrasing and con-
struction which are largely resolved when the English and
the Latin texts are set side by side.

But when all this has been taken into account, can we,
like Mr. Aldrich, acclaim Marlowe as ‘a rare scholar’?^
Not so, by modern standards, for he can be charged with
several major and many more minor mistranslations. Yet
when narrowly examined they do not, in my opinion,
form a heavy indictment against the Cambridge graduate
who was not a classical specialist. Two of his most
notorious mistakes come from his falling into the trap (as
many have done since) set by ‘can-’ instead of the more
familiar ‘can-’. Thus, ‘Plena venit canis de grege praeda
lupis’ (i. viii. 56) means ‘From the flock a full prey comes
to the hoary wolves’, but is rendered ‘From dog-kept
flocks come preys to wolves most grateful’. Here the
dative plural of ‘canus’ is confused with the genitive of
‘cams’. Similarly, in ‘Ipse locus nemorum canebat frugibus
Ide’ (ill. x (ix). 39), ‘canebat’ means ‘was white’, but is
translated as if it were ‘canebat,’ ‘did sing’ — which is
certainly forcible. More venial is the misunderstanding of
the puzzling line, ‘Carmine dissiliunt abruptis faucibus
angues’ (ii. i. 25), i.e. ‘Song bursts the serpents’ jaws apart,
and robs them of their fangs’, which is translated, ‘Snakes
leap by verse from caves of broken mountains’. Less
noticed but more of a ‘howler’ is the rendering of ‘nisi
vittatis quod erat Cassandra capillis’ (i. vii. 17) as ‘Cas-
sandra . . . Deflower’dexcept’, where ‘vittatis’ (bound with
chaplets) seems to be confused with ‘vitiatis’ (defiled).

* See above, p. 19.

36 CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

Another, more evident, verbal confusion makes havoc of
the translation of ii. ix. 22, ‘Tutaque deposito poscitur
ense rudis’, i.e. ‘The harmless foil is claimed when the
sword has been laid aside’, which is rendered as ‘His
sword laid by, safe, though rude places yields’, where
‘rudis’ (foil) is taken to be the epithet ‘rudis’. But Mar-
lowe’s mistake here arose partly from his ignorance of
the fact that a Roman gladiator’s discharge was marked
by the gift of a wooden foil. And similar antiquarian
ignorance accounts for other mistranslations. Thus in
I. viii. 100 ‘Sacra roganda Via est’ means that inquiry
must be made in the Sacred Way, the shopping centre,
but it becomes pointless in the rendering, ‘let him from
thee wend’. And in iii. ii. 19, ‘cogit nos linea jungi’ does
not mean ‘force conjoins us now’ but that the ‘linea’, the
line which divided the seats of the spectators at the
chariot race, obliged Ovid and Corinna to sit close. No
such excuse, however, can be made in the same elegy
(1. 43) for distorting the familiar invocation, ‘linguis
animisque favete’, i.e. ‘keep silence and attend’, into
‘themselves let all men cheer’. So in xiii (xii). 29, ‘ore
favent populi’ is turned into its exact opposite as ‘loud
the people hollow’. One of the very few places where
Marlowe actually shirks a difficulty is in iii. ix (viii). 33-4,
‘quid nunc Aegyptia prosunt sistra?’, which he omits
in his rendering. He evidently did not know that the
‘sistrum’ was a musical instrument used in the worship
of Isis.

These examples could be multiplied and they would
doubtless prevent Marlowe from scoring high marks in
a scholarship examination to-day. But when the 4,000
lines of the Amores are considered, and when we remember
how large a proportion of them are given a substantially
correct English equivalent in Marlowe’s version, his
Latinity, whatever its imperfections, may be said, on the
whole, not to have been unequal to its aim.

But there are higher tests to be applied to Marlowe’s
translation than that of verbal accuracy. How far does

OVID’S ELEGIES 37

it reproduce Ovid’s distinctive technique and atmosphere,
and to what degree does it bear the impress of Marlowe’s
own poetic genius? Here we may be helped by a com-
parison with Turberville’s translation of the Heroides,
allied to the A mores by its elegiac metre and its amatory
themes. Turberville was a competent translator, who
made few serious mistakes, and who carried out his task
with unflagging zeal. As has been seen above, he chose
verse-forms that allowed some expansion of the original
Latin. He is at his happiest when he is expanding some
of Ovid’s descriptive passages with additional picturesque
details.^ Here his verse runs with a lusty vigour. But in
his quest of liveliness he too often gives a free rein to
colloquialisms, e.g. ‘fist’ for ‘hand’, ‘jawes’ for ‘mouth’,
‘trull’ for ‘girl’, ‘brat’ for ‘child’, ‘smack’ for ‘kiss’. He
is fond, too, of tasteless alliteration, and he makes little
attempt to reproduce the effects of balance and anti-
thesis which are the very essence of the elegiac metre.
Thus Turberville, though born of an ‘ancient and genteel
family’ and educated at Winchester, New College, and
an Inn of Court, failed to catch in his version of the
Heroides^ in spite of its merits, Ovid’s tone of sophistica-
tion and well-bred ease.

It is the outstanding merit, on the other hand, of
Marlowe’s translation of the Amores^ that without Tur-
berville’s advantages of tradition behind him, he was able
by instinctive artistry to reproduce in no slight measure
the peculiar Ovidian atmosphere. He, too, makes use of
colloquialisms, e.g. ‘old trot’ for ‘beldame’, ‘to odds’ for
‘at variance’, ‘blab’ for ‘tattler’, ‘nags’ for ‘horses’, ‘tittle’,
and ‘tut’. But they are not so frequent as with Turber-
ville, and they have not the same disturbing effect. One
important exception must, however, be made. Though
the word may have undergone some deterioration since
the Elizabethan period, it is unfortunate that Marlowe
should almost uniformly use ‘wench’ for ‘arnica’ or

* See Ovid’s The Heroycall Epistles, translated by G. Turberville, ed.
F. S. Boas (1928), pp. xviii-xx.

38 CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

‘puella’. It is ill suited to a ‘society’ world of elegant
intrigue.

Otherwise Marlowe uses effectively a varied vocabu-
lary. We find technical terms like ‘knights of the post’
and ‘corps-du-guard’; rare words, like ‘cadess’ (jackdaw),
‘rampir’d’ (blocked-up), ‘rivelled’ (wrinkled), ‘a-life’
(dearly), ‘corrive’ (be a rival); and words used in un-
familiar fashion: ‘shine’ as an adjective, ‘ding’d’ as a
transitive verb, ‘stable’ meaning ‘to hold fast’, and ‘hood-
wink’d’ in a literal sense.

Another notable feature of his vocabulary as a translator
is the number of compound epithets that he introduces:
fair-tress’d sun, ‘rain-doubled’ floods, ‘storm-mixed’ snows,
‘wave-moist’ hands, ‘coat-tucked’ Diana, ‘four-chariot’
horses, ‘self-angry’ hands, ‘star-spangled’ towers. Not all
these and other compounds are equally clear or felicitous,
but in the main Marlowe gives the impression of handling
words and phrases in his translation with skill and ease,
and of preserving in his Elizabethan vernacular no small
trace of the metropolitan accents of imperial Rome.

But in versification Marlowe was as yet in a more ex-
perimental stage, and here his workmanship has curious
inequalities. Lines i. vii. 9-10: t

Et, vindex in matre patris, malus ultor, Orestes
ausus in arcanas poscere tela deas

are, in his version :

And he who on his mother veng’d his ire

Against the Destinies durst sharp darts require.

In the second of these lines the dragging monosyllables
and the excess of sibilants produce a harsh effect. Equally
jarring for similar reasons is the translation of i. ix. 7-8,
comparing the lover and the soldier:

Pervigilant ambo; terra requiescit uterque —
ille fores dominae servat, at ille ducis.

Both of them watch : each on the hard earth sleeps.

His mistress’ doors this: that his captain’s keeps.

OVID’S ELEGIES

Lines 29-30 of the same elegy

Mars dubius nec certa Venus; victique resurgunt
quosque neges unquam posse jacere, cadunt

are rendered:

Doubtful is war and love; the vanquish’d rise,

And who thou never think’st should fall, down lies.

Here the first line will pass, but the second exemplifies
strikingly the two metrical defects already noted.

Miss EIlis-Fermor has called attention to ‘the jarring
metre’ of ii. i. 20:

Her shut gates greater lightning than thine brought.

Another example may be found in iii. vi (v). 7-8,

With snow thaw’d from the next hill now thou gushest,

And in thy foul deep waters thick thou rushest.

Such examples could be multiplied, but they are
sufficient to prove that Marlowe as a metrist had as yet
imperfect control of his instrument. Nevertheless, there
are signs in plenty that he was soon to be master of it.
He refrains, as a rule, from the tasteless cumulative allitera-
tion to which Elizabethan translators were fatally prone.
He makes effective use of double rhymes both in single
couplets and in such longer passages as i. vii. 21-8:

But secretly her looks with checks did trounce me,

Her tears, she silent, guilty did pronounce me.

Would of mine arms my shoulders had been scanted.

Better I could part of myself have wanted.

To mine own self have I had strength so furious.

And to myself could I be so injurious?

Slaughter and mischief’s instruments, no better,

Deserved chains these cursed hands shall fetter.

Not infrequently a sonorous word gives a rhythmical
effect that presages the ‘mighty line’, as in the following
renderings :

I. ii. 8 :

Et possessa ferus pectora versat Amor.

’Tis cruel Love turmoils my captive heart.

I. ii. 28;

CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

Haec tibi magnificus pompa triumphus erit.

So will thy triumph seem magnifical.

II. ix. 21 :

Longaque subductam celant navalia pinum.

The dock inharbours ships drawn from the floods.

II. xvii. 27:

Sunt mihi pro magno felicia carmina censu.

For great revenues I good verses have.

And alone among Elizabethan translators of Ovid
Marlowe succeeds in conveying the epigrammatic effect
and antithetical poise of his original, though in an analytic
language several words may have to take the place of
one. The following are examples :

I. i. 29:

Me miserum ! certas habuit puer ille sagittas.

0 woe is me ! he never shoots but hits.

I. vii. 15:

. . . periuri promissaque velaque Thesei.

Her perjur’d Theseus’ flying vows and sails.

I. viii. 50:

Et celer admissis labitur annus equis.

And with swift horses the swift year soon leaves us.

II. vi. 60:

Quo lapis exiguus par sibi carmen habet.

The little stones these little verses have —

and another instance, where the change of meaning in
Vitty’ obscures the force of the line to our ears to-day:

III. viii (vii). 8:

Turpiter hue illuc ingeniosus eo.

1 here and there go, witty with dishonour.

In addition to happily turned single lines or couplets
there are longer passages where Marlowe’s rendering, even
if not faultless, is notably lucid and melodious. Most
familiar of these is Elegy i. xv, on the immortality con-
ferred by poetry, which Ben Jonson introduces into The

OVID’S ELEGIES 41

Poetaster, i. i. 43-84, with emendations which, as a whole,
are of little advantage. But an even better example of
Marlowe’s gifts in Book I is Elegy xiii, in which he
appeals to Aurora to delay her coming, as in 11 . 7-18:

The air is cold, and sleep is sweetest now,

And birds send forth shrill notes from every bough.
Whither runn’st thou, that men and women love not f
Hold in thy rosy horses that they move not.

Ere thou rise, stars teach seamen where to sail,

But when thou comest, they of their courses fail.

Poor travellers though tir’d, rise at thy sight.

And soldiers make them ready to the fight.

The painful hind by thee to field is sent;

Slow oxen early in the yoke are pent.

Thou cozen’st boys of sleep, and dost betray them
To pedants that with cruel lashes pay them.

In Book II, Elegy ix, bewailing the tyranny of Cupid,
11. 29-38 have the right poignant ring:

Even as a headstrong courser bears away
His rider vainly striving him to stay,

Or as a sudden gale thrusts into sea
The haven-touching bark now near the lea,

So wavering Cupid brings me back amain.

And purple Love resumes his darts again.

Strike, boy, I offer thee my naked breast,

Here thou hast strength, here thy right hand doth rest.
Here of themselves thy shafts come, as if shot;

Better than I their quiver knows them not.

In Book III, Elegy ii, the translation reproduces vividly
the successive emotions and exclamations of the lover with
his mistress at the chariot-race.

More tranquil is the rhythm of lines in iii. viii (vii).
35-44, depicting an idyllic age in the past :

Yet when old Saturn heaven’s rule posses t.

All gain in darkness the deep earth supprest.

Gold, silver, iron’s heavy weight, and brass.

In hell were harbour’d; here was found no mass.

But better things it gave, corn without ploughs,

Apples, and honey in oaks’ hollow boughs.

4427

42 CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

With strong ploughshares no man the earth did cleave,
The ditcher no marks on the ground did leave,

Nor hanging oars the troubled seas did sweep,

Men kept the shore and sail’d not into deep.

Such are some of the passages that the author of Tam-
burlaine and Doctor Faustus and Hero and Leander had no
cause to be slow in acknowledging. Indeed in Hero and
Leander there are manifest echoes from the translation,
and in Faustus the great closing soliloquy enshrines
(v. ii. 146) the invocation in the original from i. xiii. 40,
‘lente currite, noctis equi’. Most of the earlier Eliza-
bethan writers of tragedy had graduated in the lurid
rhetoric of the Senecan school. It was fortunate for
Marlowe that his genius, in its plastic stage, went through
the discipline involved in seeking to reproduce the
technique of one of the most highly accomplished poetic
craftsmen of the ancient world.

LUCAN’S FIRST BOOK

On 28 September 1593 there was entered to John Wolf
in the Stationers’ Register ‘a booke intituled Lucans first
booke of the famous Civill warr betwixt Pompey and Cesar
Englished by Christopher Marlow’. Immediately below
is the entry also to Wolf of Hero and Leander.

But Wolf does not seem to have exercised his right of
publication of either work. The only known edition of
Lucan^s First Book is a quarto printed in 1600 by P. Short
for Thomas Thorpe, who, in a dedicatory epistle to his
friend, Edward Blount, speaks of ^your old right in it’.
Blount in 1598 had published the incomplete Hero and
Leander^ and this was followed in the same year by Paul
Linley’s edition with Chapman’s continuation.^

In 1600 John Flasket published a quarto entitled Hero

‘ See further, p. 224.

LUCAN’S FIRST BOOK 43

and Leander: Begunne by Christopher Marloe: W hereunto
is added the first booke of Lucan translated line for line by
the same Author. Though Chapman’s continuation is
included, his name is not mentioned. On the other hand,
the Lucan is mentioned but not included.

Wolf must therefore have passed over his rights in
Lucan and Hero and Leander to Blount, though this is not
mentioned in the Stationers’ Register, which however
records on 2 March 1597/8 Blount’s assignment to Linley
of Hero and Leander. The right to the Lucan must also
have passed to Linley, though this is not stated, for when
on 26 June 1600 twenty-four works belonging to him
were transferred to Flasket, one of them is Hero and
Leander with the j booke of Lucan by Marlowe. The
most plausible explanation of what followed has been
given by Tucker Brooke,*

‘Flasket’s original design may have been to produce an edition
of the Marlovian part of Hero and Leander, supplemented by the
Lucan. Such an intention may have preceded the arrangement with
Linley, and would naturally in that case have been altered when
the possession of Chapman’s long continuation of Hero and
Leander rendered it unnecessary to eke out a thin volume by the
insertion of the Lucan. The latter work, being then of no immediate
consequence to Flasket, would seem to have been acquired and
at once printed by Thomas Thorpe. The Stationers’ Register
contains no record, however, of the transfer of the piece from
Flasket to Thorpe or to any one else, and the question of the precise
origin of this single early edition of the poem is not easily soluble.’

For the dating of the Lucan there is nothing but in-
ternal evidence. The translation of a Book of the De
Bello Civili, line for line, would seem, like that of the
Amores, to be a more likely enterprise for the Cambridge
student than the London playwright. In their general
merits and defects the two versions have much in common.
And Lucan, as I try to show, may have supplied Marlowe
with hints for the background of Tamburlaine. On the
other hand, the metrical evidence of run-on lines and

^ Works of Marlowe , p. 643.

44 CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

feminine endings, and the closely knit texture of the
phrasing, are marks of maturity.

But whether sooner or later, it seems, at first sight, a
sharp descent when Marlowe passed from the Amores to
the De Bello Civili^ from the Augustan to the Neronian
literary age. Ovid, with the instinct of a master of his
craft, did not venture on the loftiest poetic heights. It
is these heights that Lucan essayed to climb with his epic,
but his place is among the great verse-rhetoricians and
not among the great singers of imperial Rome. In the
sphere of art he had far less than Ovid to teach a young
English poet. But in its subject-matter and some of the
broader features of its technique the First Book of Lucan
formed a valuable complement to OvicTs Elegies for the
training of a writer of tragedy.

Instead of the sighing of ‘the low lutes of love’ there
rings the clang of

Trumpets and drums, like deadly threatening other.

Rome is not seen as a gay, luxurious capital, the home of
amusement, frivolity and vice, but as a city of terror,
panic-stricken at the approach to its gates of foes of its
own household. The leading figures are now not lovers
and their mistresses, but ‘the captains and the kings’, a
Caesar and a Pompey, and the stakes that they play for are
not kisses and caresses but dictatorships and world-
dominion. In the Amores a river in flood holds up Ovid on
his way to his lady-love; in the De Bello Civili a similarly
swollen river cannot stay Caesar on his march to Rome.

Lucan, by a bold innovation, had discarded the super-
natural machinery hitherto traditional in the epic, and
his poem is almost bare of the mythological brocade of
which Ovid was so profuse. On the other hand, he let his
eye range over the three continents, to the farthest limits
where the legions had trod, and he poured forth a wealth
of geographical and ethnographical detail which was not
lost on the author of F amburlaine. His gaze, too, at times
swept the heavens, and here again he touched an answering

LUCAN’S FIRST BOOK 45

chord in the Cambridge student of cosmology. Whether
or not Marlowe ever meditated a translation of more than
the First Book of Lucan, he found in its 700 lines congenial
material.

The claim on the title-page of the quarto that the
translation is ‘line for line’ is substantially justified,
though two or three lines are omitted from the English
version, and there is occasional variation in the order.
Again Marlowe proves himself to be a conscientious
translator, and there is no such glaring ‘howler’ as two or
three in Ovid’s Elegies^ except 1 . 423,

The Santons that rejoice in Caesar’s love

for ‘gaudetque amoto Santonus hoste’, where, however,
the text used may have had ‘amato’ instead of ‘amoto’.
An almost inspired blunder is ‘tuneful planeting’, with
reference to the music of the spheres, in 1. 640, for
‘numerisque moventibus astra’, i.e. calculations affecting
the stars. Other mistakes spring from imperfect anti-
quarian knowledge. Thus ‘Latiare caput’ (1. 535), the
capital of Latium, Alba Longa, becomes ‘the Capitol’,
Cybele ( 1 . 600) is transformed into Sibylla, and the
‘exiguum asylum’ of Romulus (1. 97), a sanctuary for
criminals, into ‘a poor church’. A curious error of another
kind is ‘Nilus’ mouth’ (1. 20) for ‘nascenti Nilo’, and there
are many other inaccuracies and some obscurities. Thus

(11. 348-9):

Arma tenenti
Omnia dat, qui justa negat

is scarcely recognizable in

They that now thwart right
In wars will yield to wrong.

Nor does ‘chain’d troops’ for ( 11 . 492-3)

serieque haerentia longa

Agmina

represent clearly the continuous rush of a mob.

46 CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

But broadly considered, especially from an Elizabethan
point of view, Marlowe’s version is forcible and adequate.
His vocabulary, allowing for the difference of subject-
matter, has much in common with that in OvicT s
Elegies, Without sacrifice of dignity or clearness he again
frequently introduces colloquial or unusual words and
phrases, e.g. ^garboils’ (tumults), Vhist’ (silent), ‘brab-
bling’ (talk^ative), ‘cleyes’ (claws), ‘wallowed’ (gushed),
‘souse down’ (knock down), ‘shivered out’ (divided),
‘butting lands’ (boundary lands), ‘open slops’ (loose
trousers). There are striking double epithets, ‘flame-
bearing’, ‘death-presaging’, ‘thunder-hoof’d’, ‘dropping-
ripe’, though they are less frequent than in the translation
from Ovid. At times Marlowe vivifies with detail the
more generalized descriptions of Lucan. Thus ‘errantes-
que domos’ of nomad tribes he turns into ‘waggons and
tents’; and ‘tollens apicem’, used of the Flamen, is elabo-
rated into ‘with net-work woollen veils’.

The rhyming couplet served better than the hexameter
for reproducing epigrammatic antitheses, and here Lucan
fared less well at Marlowe’s hands than Ovid. The test
case is the most famous line in the De Bello Civili (128),
Victrix causa deis placuit, sed victa Catoni,
which is blunted into

Caesar’s cause

The gods abetted, Cato lik’d the other.

The cynical terseness of the description of Pompey
(1- i35)>

Stat magni nominis umbra,

loses its edge in

And thought his name sufficient to uphold him.

Nor is the exact point caught of ( 11 . 175-6)

Mcnsuraque juris

Vis erat
in the translation.

Force mastered right, the strongest govern’d all.

LUCAN’S FIRST BOOK 47

Yet at times Marlowe can hit the mark in the rendering
of an aphorism, as in 11. 92-3 :

omnisque potestas
Impatiens consortis erat

which he renders

Dominion cannot suffer partnership.

Here in a single line is illustrated what in longer passages
are the cardinal virtues of Marlowe’s translation, its
verbal resonance and melodious rhythm. And it is to be
noted that these are to be found especially when the epic
rises above the tumult of the earthly conflicts of men into
more elemental regions. Thus it is when Lucan pictures
the ascent of Nero to heaven ( 11 . 47 ff.):

where thou wilt reign as king,

Or mount the Sun’s flame-bearing chariot,

And with bright restless fire compass the earth,

Undaunted though her former guide be chang’d;

Nature and every power shall give thee place.

What god it please thee be, or where to sway —

or in this vision of the dissolution of the universe (73 ff.) :

So when this world’s compounded union breaks,

Time ends, and to old Chaos all things turn.

Confused stars shall meet, celestial lire
Fleet on the floods, the earth shoulder the sea,

Affording it no shore, and Phoebe’s wain
Chase Phoebus, and enrag’d affect his place,

And strive to shine by day, and full of strife
Dissolve the engines of the broken world —

or in this description of a territory which is the prey of
contending elements (410 ff.):

that uncertain shore

Which is nor sea nor land, but ofttimes both.

And changeth as the ocean ebbs and flows;

Whether the sea roll’d always from that point
Whence the wind blows, still forced to and fro;

Or that the wandering main follow the moon;

Or flaming Titan (feeding on the deep)

Pulls them aloft and makes the surge kiss heaven.

CLASSICAL TRANSLATIONS

Philosophers, look you ; for unto me,

Thou cause, whatever thou be whom God assigns
This great effect, art hid.

Here Marlowe, with his passionate interest in cosmo-
logy, may well have felt the appeal of the words, ‘Quae-
rite, quos agitat mundi labor’, which he translates,
‘Philosophers, look you’. So, too, his speculative instinct
must have been stirred by the description of what were
to Lucan the paradoxical beliefs of the Druids (449 ff.) :

And only gods and heavenly powers you know.

Or only know you nothing. For you hold
That souls pass not to silent Erebus
Or Pluto’s bloodless kingdom, but elsewhere
Resume a body ; so (if truth you sing)

Death brings long life.

‘With Marlowe’, as Caroline Spurgeon has said, ‘images
drawn from books, especially the classics, and from the
sun, moon, planets, and heavens far outnumber all
others’.^ In the growth of such images the translation of
Lucan’s First Book played its part. And in three lines
whose music is in an exceptionally soft key (443-5) :

And you, French Bardi, whose immortal pens
Renown the valiant souls slain in your wars,

Sit safe at home and chant sweet poesy —

may we not find a source and seed of the glorious rhapsody
in Tamburlainey Part I, v. ii, beginning:

If all the pens that ever poets held, . . .

* Shakespeare's Imagery^ p. 13. See also Chart II, illustrating the
range and subjects of Marlowe’s imagery.

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE

T he Tragedy of Dido y Queen of Carthagey based upon
the earlier Books of the Aeneidy stands, whatever
their respective dates may have been, in intimate relation
with Marlowe’s translations from Ovid and Lucan and
with his Cambridge studies. The play is preserved only in
a quarto edition, 1594, entitled The | Tragedie of Dido
Queene of Carthage: | Played by the Children of her
Maie sties ChappelL | Written by Christopher Marlowe y
and I Thomas Nash, Gent, | . . . Printedy by the Widdowe
Orwiny for Thomas Woodcocke, Though Woodcocke was
under-warden of the Stationers’ Company the book was
not entered for copyright, and Tucker Brooke suggests
that it was probably published almost at the moment of
his death on 22 April 1594.^

When was Dido acted by the Children of the Chapel ?
There is no record of any performance by this company
in London between 1584 and 1601. But during 1586-7,
towards the close of the academic careers of Marlowe
and Nashe, they visited Ipswich and Norwich,^ and while
performing in the eastern counties they may have got
possession of a play written at Cambridge and produced
it, though it was not very suitable dramatic fare for a pro-
vincial audience. If so, the natural inference from the
title-page would be that Marlowe of Corpus Christ! and
Nashe of St. John’s had collaborated in their student
days in the work. But such intimacy as they had seems to

* Didoy ed. Tucker Brooke, pp. 118-19. ®rooke points out that the
rights in Dido passed from Woodcocke to Linley, and that among Linley’s
books transferred to Flasket (cf. above, p. 43) were Cupydes Journey to
hell with the tragedie of Dido.

^ In the Ipswich 1586-7 accounts the payment pf 20s. to ‘the quenes
players being the children’ is entered under 26 May [i 587]; in the Norwich
accounts for the same period a similar payment ‘to the children of the
Q. chapel’ is not dated. See J. T. Murray, English Dramatic Companies y ii,
292 and 366.

4427

50 THE TRAGEDY OF

belong to a later period, and there is little internal
evidence of Nashe’s hand in the play. It is more probable
that he prepared it for publication after Marlowe’s
death. His own play, Summer^ s Last Will and Testament^
had been acted in 1592 by a company of boys apparently
before Archbishop Whitgift at Croydon.

Light might have been thrown on these points had
any of the three known copies of the 1594 quarto con-
tained the tribute by ‘Tho. Nash in Carmine elegiaco
tragoediae Didonis praefixo in obitum Christoph. Mar-
lovii’, mentioned by Thomas Tanner in his Bibliotheca
Britannico-Hibernica^ p. 512 (1748). Thomas Warton
more than thirty years later assured Malone that he had
seen a copy of Dido in 1754 T. Osborne’s shop with the
elegy by Nash inserted immediately after the title-page.^
But he let pass the chance of buying ‘this rare piece’ and
it has disappeared from view. This is the more unfortu-
nate in that the close investigations of Knutowski,^ R. B.
McKerrow,^ and Tucker Brooke have revealed very little
in Dido that there is reason to credit to Nashe. The lame
Vulcan dancing (i. i. 32) has a parallel in Summer'^s Last
Will and Testament y 11 . 1933-8, and the reference to
Ulysses stealing into the tent of Rhesus and intercepting
Dolon (i. i. 70-3) is repeated in The Unfortunate Traveller.
Some rare words, or with unusual meanings, found in
Nashe but not elsewhere in Marlowe, occur in Dido.
Among them are ‘attract’ = take in (i. i. 136), ‘famoused’
(i. ii. 21 and v. i. 275), ‘shelves’ = sandbanks (iii. i. 107
and IV. iv. 58), ‘hoising’ (iv. iv. 15), and ‘Getulian’
(ill. iii. 19) used contemptuously.^ There may be traces
here of some revision by Nashe, but the scenes in which
these passages and phrases appear have, as a whole, the
stamp of Marlowe. It will be simpler, therefore, to speak

* See Malone’s note in the Bodleian copy of Dido^ quoted by Tucker
Brooke, op. cit., p. 122.

^ Das Dido- Drama von Marlowe und Nash (1905).

3 Works of Thomas Nashe, vol. ii (1904) and vol. iv (1908).

^ See further notes ad loc. by McKerrow and Brooke.

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE 51

of him as the author of Dido while recognizing that his
name may here and there cover that of Nashe.

The metrical evidences point to an early date for Dido,
The considerably larger proportion of rhymed couplets
than in any other of the plays links it with the translation
of the A mores. But it is curious that Marlowe, who had
there avoided the exaggerated alliteration of Turberville
and Churchyard, can in Dido repeatedly write lines like
Triton, I know, hath filPd his trump with Troy.

And they so wrack’d and welter’d by the waves.

And slice the sea with sable-colour’d ships.

On the other hand, except in a few passages inten-
tionally in a lighter vein, the occasionally jarring collo-
quialisms of the Elegies are absent.

The almost unbroken succession in Dido of end-stopped
lines may well have been influenced by Marlowe’s transla-
tion of thousands of Ovidian couplets. But a monotonous
effect is largely averted by various metrical devices.
‘Nine-syllable lines (in which the first foot is made up of
a single syllable) are freely used, and hexameters are not
uncommon, while trimeters, tetrameters, and syllabic
verse pauses are employed for definite effect.’^ These
metrical characteristics are common to Dido and the two
Parts of E amburlaine^ and they have also many verbal
parallels.

But there are other parallels with later works. Dido’s
cry (iv. iv. 123) :

And he’ll make me immortal with a kiss
anticipates Faustus’s invocation to Helen (v. i. 109), as
do also V. i. 146-8. And the line (ii. i. 231),

Threatening a thousand deaths at every glance

reappears unchanged in Hero and Leander (i. 382). There
are numerous, though less striking, parallels with Ed-
ward //, and Knutowski has conjectured that Marlowe
revised Dido while he was writing his historical play.^

* Tucker Brooke, op. cit., p. 116.

^ Knutowski, op. cit., pp. 56-9.

THE TRAGEDY OF

Whatever the date was of his dramatization of the stoiy
of Dido Marlowe had at least three predecessors, who had
all written in Latin. John Ritwise, headmaster of St.
Paul’s School (1522-31), had ‘made the Tragedy of Dido
out of Virgil and acted the same with the scholars of his
school before Cardinal Wolsey with great applause’.^
Edward Halliwell, a former Fellow of King’s College,
made another adaptation, for performance before Queen
Elizabeth in the College chapel on 7 August 1564.^
William Gager, of Christ Church, Oxford, wrote and
produced a third adaptation in the College hall before
Albertus Alasco, Prince Palatine of Siradia in Poland, on
12 June 1583.3 The plays of Ritwise and Halliwell have
disappeared. Gager’s Dido was not printed, but is pre-
served in Christ Church Library in a manuscript which
was probably ‘the book of the play’ prepared for the
use of the Prince Palatine or the Chancellor of the Uni-
versity, the Earl of Leicester. It is very unlikely that
Marlowe knew this unpublished play, which combined
a Senecan structure with elaborate scenic effects, and
which has curiously slight parallelism with Dido^ Queen
of Carthage^ though both are quarried from the same
source.^

Marlowe is more likely to have been influenced by the
plays of Lyly dealing with classical subjects and acted by
the Children of the Chapel and of Paul’s. Sir Edmund
Chambers has shown that the stage-setting of Dido is
similar to that of Lyly’s court-comedies.

‘I think that one side of the stage was arranged en pastorelle, and
represented the wood between the sea-shore and Carthage, where
the shipwrecked Trojans land and where later Aeneas and Dido
hunt. Here was the cave where they take shelter from the storm.
. . . The other side of the stage represents Carthage. Possibly a

* A. Wood, Athenae (ed. Bliss), i. 35,

^ F. S. Boas, Vnw, Drama in Tudor Age^ p. 94.

3 Ibid., pp. 183-91, where an account is given of Gager’s play, and it
is compared with Dido, Queen of Carthage,

An English play ‘of dido & eneas’ was performed by the Admiral’s
men on 8 January 1597/8. Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Greg, ii. 189.

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE 53

wall with a gate in it was built across the stage, dividing off the
two regions.’*

What is certain is that Marlowe when basing a play upon
so august a foundation as the earlier Books of the Aeneid
felt himself free, as with the less sacrosanct Hero and
Leander of Musaeus, to draw upon his general classical
reading. Nothing could be farther from the decorous
gravity of Virgilian epic than the opening scene of Dido^
when ‘the curtains draw’ and ‘there is discovered Jupiter
dandling Ganymede upon his knee’. The half-line in the
Aeneid glancing at ‘rapti Ganymedis honores’ as one of
the causes of Juno’s rage against Aeneas gives but a slight
cue for this elaborate scene of dalliance between Jupiter
and the ‘female wanton boy’ who is the ‘darling’ of his
‘thoughts’. In such an episode Marlowe, who treats love
between man and woman with so delicate a touch, may
have given a handle to those who, like Richard Baines,
charged him with abnormal vice.

To the pert complaint of the cup-bearer that Juno
‘reach’d me such a rap for that I spill’d’, Jupiter replies
with an adjuration borrowed, so far as is known, from the
Iliad, XV. 18 ff.

I vow, if she but once frown on thee more,

To hang her, meteor-like, ’twixt heaven and earth
And bind her, hand and foot, with golden cords.

As once I did for harming Hercules.

And there is an echo of the A mores (i. xiii. 40) when he
reminds Ganymede how he has

oft driven back the horses of the Night
Whenas they would have hal’d thee from my sight.

From each of the Olympians in turn some treasure is to
be rifled to adorn or gratify Jupiter’s ‘little love’ — even
Juno’s gems worn on her marriage-day.

With the entry of Venus Virgil also first enters, though
treated with scant ceremony, for the seventy lines telling
of the wreck of Aeneas’ fleet by Aeolus and his winds are

* Eliz. Stage, iii. 35-6.

54 THE TRAGEDY OF

cut down to a few, and are followed by variations in a
strain of Ovidian fantasy on the theme (i. i. 64 ff.):

Poor Troy must now be sack’d upon the sea.

The voice of Virgil sounds again in Jupiter’s speech
assuring Venus that her ‘Aeneas’ wandering fate is firm’,
and that when his warfare is accomplished on Italian soil,
poor Troy, so long suppress’d,

From forth her ashes shall advance her head.

In the prophecy that follows of the fortunes of Rome
it is bright Ascanius, Aeneas’ son, not the Virgilian
Augustus, who (i. i. 98-103)

Shall build his throne amidst those starry bowers.

That earth-born Atlas, groaning, underprops:

No bounds but heaven shall bound his empery.

Whose azur’d gates, enchased with his name.

Shall make the morning haste her grey uprise.

To feed her eyes with his engraven fame.

Again Marlowe draws upon cosmic imagery in lines that
might have been written of Tamburlaine.

The change from heaven to earth is awkwardly managed,
for Venus after her dialogue in Olympus with Jupiter,
who departs with Ganymede, spies her son Aeneas and
his companions landing on the Punic shore. In the address
of Aeneas to his followers and in his interview with Venus
disguised as a huntress Marlowe follows Virgil closely.
But the playwright’s instinct is shown in the omission of
redundant material, and in the addition of such human
touches as that of Ascanius fainting for want of food.

In the second scene there is the more significant addi-
tion of larbas listening to the story of Ilioneus and his
fellows who have been separated from Aeneas. Virgil
mentions larbas once among Libyan suitors rejected by
Dido {Aen, iv. 36) :

despectus larbas

Ductoresque alii, quos Africa terra triumphis
Dives alit.

But it will be seen that it is a constant feature of
Marlowe’s technique to give a heroine in his dramas two

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE 55

rival lovers, and larbas foreshadows the important part
that he is to play by welcoming the strangers to the court
in Dido’s name.

At the beginning of Act II there is another notable
departure from the Virgilian source where Aeneas on
entering Carthage sees in the temple of Juno pictures
representing episodes from the Siege of Troy. In the
play these are replaced by a statue of Priam in stone,
about which Aeneas weaves fancies that are in Ovidian
rather than Virgilian vein (ii. i. 24 ff.):

Achates, though mine eyes say this is stone,

Yet thinks my mind that this is Priamus

Achates, see, King Priam wags his head!

He is alive; Troy is not overcome.

When Dido appears and welcomes Aeneas to a banquet,
his reiterated refusal to sit beside her because of his mean
fortune is incongruous and has no suggestion in the epic.
As soon, however, as Aeneas responds to her persuasive plea
(ii. i. 106-9):

May I entreat thee to discourse at large.

And truly too, how Troy was overcome }

For many tales go of that city’s fall
And scarcely do agree upon one point —

Marlowe rises, in the main, to the height of the great
argument. Gager in his Latin play had ingeniously
shirked the difficulty of introducing the long recital of the
downfall of Troy.^ Marlowe compresses the 800 lines of
this recital in Book II of the Aeneid into 180 lines of vivid
narrative, broken at intervals by Dido’s sympathetic out-
cries. Translating and adapting, omitting, transposing,
and adding, the dramatist retells the tragic story from the
drawing of the fatal horse within the walls till the flight
of Aeneas with his family to the ships. The horse’s entry

See Univ. Drama in the Tudor Age^ pp. 184-5.

THE TRAGEDY OF

is marked by a roll of unmistakably Marlovian, not
Virgilian, music (ii. i. 172 ff.):

O had it never enter’d, Troy had stood!

But Priamus, impatient of delay,

Enforc’d a wide breach in that rampir’d wall.

Which thousand battering-rams could never pierce,

And so came in this fatal instrument.

From out his entrails Neoptolemus,

Setting his spear upon the ground, leapt forth.

And after him a thousand Grecians more.

In whose stern faces shin’d the quenchless fire
That after burnt the pride of Asia.

It is Marlowe also, in cruder vein, not Virgil who gives
the details of the carnage in Troy and who adds lurid
details to the tragic fate of Priam’s youngest son. Nor do
we recognize Virgil’s Priam, buckling on his long-disused
armour and feebly grasping his sword, in the suppliant
king who pleads with Pyrrhus (ii. i. 233-9):

Achilles’ son, remember what I was,

Father of fifty sons, but they are slain;

Lord of ray fortunes, but my fortune’s turn’d;

King of this city, but my Troy is fir’d;

And now am neither father, lord, nor king:

Yet who so wretched but desires to live?

O let me live, great Neoptolemus!

In their artificial balance these lines have an Ovidian ring,
and it is Metamorphoses^ xiii. 558 ff., that suggested Hecu-
ba’s use of her hands upon a murderer (ii. i. 244-6):

At which the frantic queen leap’d on his face.

And in his eyelids hanging by the nails,

A little while prolong’d her husband’s life.

But it is the dramatist alone who is responsible for the
lines that follow:

At last the soldiers pull’d her by the heels.

And swung her howling in the empty air.

Which sent an echo to the wounded king :

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE

Whereat he lifted up his bed-rid limbs,

And would have grappled with Achilles’ son,

Forgetting both his want of strength and hands;

Which he disdaining, whisk’d his sword about,

And with the wind thereof the king fell down.

Then from the navel to the throat at once
He ripp’d old Priam.

They are unique in Marlowe’s writings. Elsewhere in
these there are passages of rhodomontade on the one hand
and of bathos on the other, but there is nothing that is
frankly absurd. I agree with Bullen and Tucker Brooke
that it is this episode that is burlesqued in Hamlet^ ii. ii.
420-82. In the play that was caviare to the general there
was, says the Prince, ‘one chief speech I chiefly loved;
’twas Aeneas’ tale to Dido; and thereabout of it especially
where he speaks of Priam’s slaughter’. Gager, it has been
seen, omitted this recital by Aeneas. Marlowe, on the
other hand, reproduced as much of it as was possible,
without breaking his dramatic framework. In it he gives
a prominence to the episode of Pyrrhus and Priam that
is quite out of proportion to its place in Virgil’s narrative.
Moreover, though the Pyrrhus of the Aeneid is ruthless
and mad with slaughter, it is only such phrases as ‘his
harness dropping blood’ (1. 213) and ‘with Megsera’s eyes
star’d in their face’ (1. 230) that can have suggested to
Shakespeare ‘from head to foot Now is he total gules’
and ‘with eyes like carbuncles’. So, too, when Shakespeare
wrote :

Pyrrhus at Priam drives; in rage strikes wide
But with the whiff and wind of his fell sword,

The unnerved father falls

he must have had in mind

whisk’d his sword about,

And with the wind* thereof the king fell down.

And though the First Player’s ‘mobled queen’ differs
as much from Marlowe’s frantic Hecuba as from the

* The quarto reads wound, of which Shakespeare is, in a sense, the first
emendator.

4427

58 THE TRAGEDY OF

venerable affrighted wife and mother in the Aeneid^
Shakespeare was thinking of the grisly details of Priam’s
slaughter in Dido when he added the caricaturing touch:

When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport
In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs.

One thing, however, must be also said. The Shakespeare
of Hamlet was not the younger Shakespeare of A Mid-
summer Nights Dream who in Tyramus and Thisbe’
could write sheer burlesque. There are lines in the
Player’s speech, e.g.

So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood,

And like a neutral to his will and matter
Did nothing

and

Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven
And passion in the gods —

which Marlowe might have been glad to father at second
hand.

Aeneas’ tale of his own escape, and of the loss of his
wife Creusa, is compressed into a few lines, though to add
further horror to the recital Marlowe makes him witness
the tragic fates of Cassandra and Polyxena. Dido can
bear no more — T die with melting ruth: Aeneas, leave.’
The excited questions that burst from the other listeners
have true dramatic force, as has also Aeneas’ appeal to
Achates to speak for him, ‘sorrow hath tir’d me quite’.

When Dido leads off the company to cheer them with
some pleasing sport, Venus, ‘entering with Cupid at an-
other door, takes by the sleeve’ Ascanius who is following
the others. In verses of lyrical charm that fall sweetly on
the ear after ‘the tumult and the shouting’ of Aeneas’
recital, the Goddess beguiles the child into her arms, and
after singing him asleep lays him in a ‘grove’, probably
outside the wall. With Cupid transformed into the like-
ness of Ascanius and nestling in her lap. Dido is no longer
a free agent. Thus when at the beginning of Act III she
is half inclined to lend a favouring ear to the suit of larbas,

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE 59

the little love-god turns her heart to his brother Aeneas.
He finds an ally in Dido’s sister Anna, whom the dramatist,
without any cue from Virgil, represents as a jealous rival
for larbas’ love. And he is almost equally far from Virgil
when he turns Dido’s burning passion ‘to favour and to
prettiness’ (iii. i. 84-9):

rU make me bracelets of his golden hair;

His glistering eyes shall be my looking-glass;

His lips an altar, where I’ll offer up
As many kisses as the sea hath sands;

Instead of music I will hear him speak;

His looks shall be my only library.

In a similarly fanciful vein is her promise to repair the
Trojan ships, on condition that they bear away Achates,
not Aeneas (iii. i. 115 ff.):

I’ll give thee tackling made of rivell’d gold,

Wound on the barks of odoriferous trees;

Oars of massy ivory, full of holes,

Through which the water shall delight to play

The masts whereon thy swelling sails shall hang.

Hollow pyramides of silver plate;

The sails of folded lawn, where shall be wrought
The wars of Troy — but not Troy’s overthrow.

This sugared speech changes to an acid tone as she
exhibits to Aeneas the pictures of her suitors from many
lands and criticizes each in turn. As we listen to her
sharp comments and to her hints of where her heart is
given we seem to have quitted Carthage for Portia’s
Belmont.

The reappearance of Juno at this crisis in iii. ii. is
ingeniously associated with a design to take her revenge
for the insults to her deity by murdering in his sleep

Aeneas’ cursed brat.

The boy wherein false Destiny delights,

The heir of Fame, the favourite of the Fates.

But Venus, warned by her doves, saves Ascanius.

THE TRAGEDY OF

Thereafter, as in Aeneidy iv. 90-128, the two goddesses
make a truce and Juno sets forth her plan for bringing
Dido and Aeneas together in a cave while they are hunt-
ing. How the Shakespeare of A Midsummer Nighfs Dream
would have delighted in iii. iii in loading with Warwick-
shire detail the Virgilian ‘odora canum vis’ and the
‘sonipes’ champing his bit! But animals appealed little to
Marlowe. He prefers to make further play with the rivalry
between larbas and Aeneas, with the counterfeit bragging
of Cupid-Ascanius, and with the idea, suggested by the
stage-setting, that the hunt is in the wood where Aeneas
and his followers had first set foot.

So, too, with the fateful meeting in the cave. It is over
the personal aspects that the dramatist lingers. Dido is
still the woman who half reveals and half conceals her
passion (iii. iv. 26-34):

And yet I’ll speak — and yet I’ll hold my peace.

Do shame her worst, I will disclose my grief :

Aeneas, thou art he — what did I say
Something it was that now I have forgot.

Aen. What means fair Dido by this doubtful speech ?

Dido. Nay, nothing; but Aeneas loves me not.

Aen. Aeneas’ thoughts dare not ascend so high

As Dido’s heart which monarchs might not scale.

When the queen retorts, ‘It was because I saw no king
like thee’, Aeneas offers his heart and vows, with oath on
oath,

Never to leave these new-upreared walls,

Whiles Dido lives and rules in Juno’s town —

Never to like or love any but her.

In ecstasy she cries (iii. iv. 51-3):

What more than Delian music do I hear.

That calls my soul from forth his living seat
To move unto the measures of delight.

She hails him as King of Carthage and bestows on him
the ring with which her first husband had wooed her.

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE 6i

They retire to the back of the cave,^ where their union
takes place. And it is noteworthy that here, for once,
Marlowe omitted a cosmic background to the scene,
though Virgil had given him the lead in Aeneid^ iv.
166-8:

Prima et Tellus et pronuba luno
Dant signum ; fulsere igncs et conscius aether
Conubiis, summoque ulularunt vertice Nymphae.

‘The ritual of a Roman marriage is here undertaken’,
as J. W. Mackail has said,^ ‘by the elemental Powers.’
But the dramatist ignores the significance of this and the
omen of woe to come in the words that follow:

Ille dies primus leti primusque malorum
Causa fuit.

Events move swiftly to their tragic close. larbas, stung
to fury by the sight of the lovers coming from the cave,
first, with a Marlovian gesture, curses ‘unrcvenging Jove’
(iv. i. 17), and then in the next scene, in a more Virgilian
temper, seeks to appease him with sacrifice on his altars,
and prays for his help against his rival (iv. ii. 19-22):

Now if thou be’st a pitying god of power.

On whom ruth and compassion ever waits.

Redress these wrongs, and warn him to his ships
That now afflicts me with his flattering eyes.

But even with celestial intervention Aeneas’ announce-
ment of his departure is unplausibly abrupt after his
unconditional vows of fidelity to Dido (iv. iii. 1-7):

Carthage, my friendly host, adieu !

Since destiny doth call me from the shore :

Hermes this night, descending in a dream,

Hath summon’d me to fruitful Italy;

* This seems the interpretation of the S.D. Exeunt to the cave, taken
in connexion with the S.D. at the beginning of the scene, Enter Aeneas
and Dido in the cave, at several times. In iv. i. 16 Anna cries, ‘Behold
where both of them come forth the cave’.

^ The Aeneid, ed. by J. W. Mackail, p. 138. Mackail illustrates the
statement quoted above in detail.

THE TRAGEDY OF

Jove wills it so; my mother wills it so;

Let my Phoenissa grant and then I go.

Grant she or no, Aeneas must away.

The remainder of Act IV, representing a first attempt
of Aeneas to sail away, of which Virgil gives no hint, is
a tamer anticipation of his final leave-taking in Act V.
It gives Marlowe the opportunity of lingering over the
relations between the lovers and of again embroidering
them with luxuriant fancies. When Anna at Dido’s com-
mand stays the Trojan from sailing, he pleads that he was
merely bidding farewell to Achates and that he would not
have left his only son. In an ecstasy of relief the queen
invests him with her crown and sceptre, and cries (iv. iv.

45 ff-):

Now looks Aeneas like immortal Jove:

O where is Ganymede, to hold his cup,

And Mercury, to fly for what he calls f
Ten thousand Cupids hover in the air.

And fan it in Aeneas’ lovely face!

Heaven, envious of our joys, is waxen pale,

And when we whisper, then the stars fall down.

To be partakers of our honey talk.

It is an elemental love that here annihilates space, as
in 11. 1 2 1-3 it annihilates time:

If he forsake me not, I never die;

For in his looks I see eternity.

And he’ll make me immortal with a kiss.

It is a steep descent from such transcendental flights to
Dido’s manoeuvres in sending for Aeneas’ oars, tackling,
and sails, round which she lets her fancies run riot in
IV. iv. 126-65, bidding the nurse take Ascanius to

her country home. The idyllic picture of this in iv. v.
4-1 1, and the aged crone’s amorous musings, prompted
by Cupid-Ascanius, form a lighter interlude before the
final tragedy in Act V, where the play returns to its

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE 63

Virgilian source. At Jupiter’s command Hermes, now ap-
pearing not in a dream but in person, warns Aeneas, as
he is drawing the ‘platform’ of a statelier Troy, that he

must straight to Italy,

Or else abide the wrath of frowning Jove.

It is, of course, an excrescence on the original tale that
Aeneas, robbed by Dido of his ships’ furniture, should
have his needs supplied by larbas who, in his eagerness to
get rid of his rival, shows himself in a gracious guise, in-
consistent with his previous utterances.

Then comes the dramatist’s hardest task — to reproduce
the agony of a woman scorned, crystallized in the words
{Aen. iv. 300-1):

Saevit inops animi totamque incensa per urbem
Bacchatur.

It is here that Marlowe does not stand the test. There
is little of Bacchic frenzy in the queen’s words, making
play with her lover’s ‘farewell’ (v. i. 105):

Farewell! is this the mends for Dido’s love?

Do Trojans use to quit their lovers thus?

Fare well may Dido, so Aeneas stay;

I die, if my Aeneas say farewell.

Aen. Then let me go, and never say farewell.

Dido. ‘Let me go; farewell; I must from hence.’

These words are poison to poor Dido’s soul.

Was Marlowe himself half-conscious of his limitations
when, as the queen becomes more impassioned, he puts
into her mouth three of Virgil’s own lines {Aen. iv. 317-

19): .

Si bene quid de te merui, fuit aut tibi quicquam
Duke meum, miserere domus labentis et istam^

Oro^ si quis adhuc frecibus locus^ exue mentem.

answered similarly by the Trojan {Aen. iv. 360-1):

Desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis;

Italiam non sponte sequor.

64 THE TRAGEDY OF

Then follow lines not unworthy to be the sequel of even
Virgillan music (v. i. 141-8):

Hast thou forgot how many neighbour kings
Were up in arms, for making thee my love ?

How Carthage did rebel, larbas storm.

And all the world calls me a second Helen,

For being entangled in a stranger’s looks?

So thou wouldst prove as true as Paris did,

Would, as fair Troy was, Carthage might be sack’d,

And I be called a second Helena.

The name of Helen had always a talismanic effect on
Marlowe. But when Aeneas at last forsakes her, Dido
again gives rein to her exuberant fancy. She will follow
her lover in the air like Icarus, or ride to him on a dol-
phin’s back. She cheats herself into the belief that she
sees him coming back to her arms. Then with a swift
revulsion of feeling she resolves to (v. i. 269-71)

die in fury of this oversight.

Ay, I must be the murderer of myself;

No, but I am not; yet I will be straight.

In the epic the harrowing picture of the deserted
woman dooming herself to death on the sacrificial pyre
fills some two hundred lines, which are compressed by
Marlowe into fifty. The queen’s last agony finds voice in
only a single speech (v. i. 289-313), consigning her faith-
less lover’s relics to the flames, foretelling the Punic
conqueror who would take revenge for her on Rome, and
with her last breath again using Virgil’s own words
{Aen, iv. 628-9 660):

Litora litoribus contraria,Jluctibus undas
Imprecor, arnia armis; pugnent ipsique nepotes!

Live false Aeneas! truest Dido dies;

5zV, sic juvat ire sub umbras.

With the cry, ‘Dido, I come to thee’, larbas too kills
himself, and with the echoing cry :

Now, sweet larbas stay! I come to thee

Anna falls lifeless over his body.

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE 65

With the prominence given in the play to larbas and
Anna it was natural that Marlowe should associate them
in death with the Carthaginian queen. But here he
showed himself unequal to his august source. Dido in the
Aeneid stands out alone in tragic grandeur. ‘ While she
is there’, in Mackail’s words, ^ ‘she fills the whole canvas.

. . . Into her Virgil pours all his insight into the human
heart and his sense of purely human tragedy.’ Nor was
her tragedy purely human —

Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem.

It was Dido’s fate to be sacrificed in the course of the
divinely ordained sequence of events that linked the fall
of Troy with the rise of Rome. It was that mighty con-
ception that lay at the heart of the Aefieid, What were
larbas and Anna to Virgil that he should weep for them ?
It was otherwise with Marlowe. His translation from
Lucan shows an interest in Roman history. But it was
not through history that antiquity laid upon him its
chief spell. The Virgilian conception of the world-
destiny of Rome was outside his ken. He was absorbed,
as has been seen, in the emotional aspects of the story of
Dido, and he decked them out with a lavish wealth of
fantasies.

It was not only Virgil’s theme, but his art, that offered
a challenge to the English dramatist. The secret of that
art was incommunicable. Its poignant expression in
haunting cadences of the pathos of mortal things is far
removed from all that is most distinctive in Marlowe’s
genius. Such key-lines as

Sunt lacrimae rerum ct mentem mortalia tangunt
or

Non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco

have no counterpart in the English play.

It is just because Marlowe had already found his own
voice that so many lines and phrases in his later writings

* The Aeneid, ed. by J. W. Mackail, Ixvii.

4427

66 THE TRAGEDY OF

are anticipated in Dido, Yet any one who had speculated
on his future as a dramatist from Dido would probably
have gone astray. In the relations of Aeneas and Dido,
larbas and Anna, sexual love has a relatively far larger
place than it was to fill in his other plays. Never again
was a woman to be the protagonist in his theatre.^ The
representation of Jupiter and the other Olympians on the
traditional classical lines gave no hint of the speculative
flights of the ‘atheist’ Marlowe into the supersensual
sphere, as in Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus, Nor does
there throb through Dido the passionate aspiration after
the fullness of power and beauty and knowledge which,
in one aspect or another, links Marlowe’s other plays. He
may have instinctively felt that the Children of the Chapel
could not ‘boy’ the ‘greatness’ of such themes. He was
to find interpreters of them on the public stage.

There were three principal adult companies acting
in London when Marlowe arrived there in 1587. The
Queen’s men had been formed in 1583 and had absorbed
a number of the chief players from the companies of the
Earls of Leicester and Oxford and others. The period of
their special vogue was ended by the death of Richard
Tarlton in 1588. The company of Ferdinando Stanley,
Lord Strange, were both players and tumblers, and it is
of their feats of activity that there is the fuller record.
Perhaps by 1588-9, and certainly by 1590-1, they amal-
gamated till 1594 with the Lord Admiral’s company.
This company, serving Lord Howard of Effingham, bore
the title of the Admiral’s men after his appointment to
this high office in July 1585. It may have been either then
or some years later that Edward Alleyn joined the com-
pany and became its star actor. We know for certain from
the 1590 title-page of F amburlaine that it was by the
Admiral’s men that both Parts were produced, but it is
doubtful, though probable, that Alleyn was already with

^ Unless his hand is to be seen in Arden of Feversham. See below,
pp. 198-200.

DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE 67

them to create the hero’s role of which he became the
great exponent. And the vague reference on the title-
page of the earliest editions to the two Parts having been
‘shewed vpon Stages in the Citie of London’ suggests
that Marlowe may have first won dramatic fame not in
one of the few theatres built by 1587 but in one or other
of the inn-yards still used for playhouse purposes.

TamburJaine

die Great,

Who, from n Scythian Shepbear^e,

tile tire ano b)oQnoec{ulI€mue(li,
became a moft puiITant and migh-
tyc Monarque^

And (for his tyranny^ and terrour in
Warrc)was tcarnicdi

(sir^e Scourge Of

Deuidedinto t^o 'TrancallDip

courfes, as they were fuodrie times
(ijcuieii bjpon Stagett in mt
of LondoUt

risfit^onoKaDTet^eJto;])

SDmp^alt, W fouanttn.

Vovi fitfl ( ao j newlie put>linied«

LONDON.

^ jlttfebljp Richard 1 hones rattle fijllf
of the Role and Crownc ncercHol-
borne Bridge, i j p o.

THE FIRST PART OF
‘TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT*

I T is a paradox that when they presented to the reading
public the two most epoch-making of pre-Shake-
spearian plays, The Spanish Tragedy and Tamburlaine the
Greats the publishers decked them out with flowery title-
pages but did not give the names of their authors. In the
former case the omission was rectified by Thomas Hey-
wood in his Apology for Actors {1612)^ where, in quoting
three lines from The Spanish Tragedy, Act iv. i, he names
Kyd as the writer. In tantalizing fashion, twenty-one
years later, he just avoided doing the same service for
Tamburlaine when in his Cockpit prologue to The Jew
of Malta he said :

We know not how our Play may pass this stage,

But by the best *of Poets in that age *Marlo.

The Malta Jew had being, and was made;

And He, then by the best of ^Actors play’d : *Allin.

In Hero and Leander, one did gain
A lasting memory; in Tamberlaine,

This Jew, with others many: th’other wan
The attribute of peerless.

Here Marlowe is saluted as the author of The Jew of
Malta and of Hero and Leander*, Alleyn as the creator on
the stage of the parts of Tamburlaine and Barabas, ‘with.
others many’. There is no allusion to the authorship
of T amburlaine, though the introduction of it alone
by name, out of the many plays in which Alleyn had
figured, between The Jew of Malta and Hero and
Leander seems to imply that Heywood attributed it to
Marlowe.

More unquestionable had been the implication almost
half a century before in Greene’s epistle ‘to the gentlemen

70 THE FIRST PART OF

readers’ prefixed to his Perimedes the Blacksmith (1588),
where he complains that he is derided
‘for that I could not make my verses jet upon the stage in tragicall
buskins, everie word filling the mouth like the Faburden of Bo-Bell,
daring God out of heaven with that Atheist Pamburlatiy or
blaspheming with the mad preest of the sonne : but let me rather
openly pocket up the Asse at Diogenes hand: then wantonlie set
out such impious instances of intollerable poetrie, such mad and
scoffing poets, that have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlins race.’

The last words in conjunction with the gibe at the
Atheist Tamburlaine and with the Cambridge documen-
tary evidence that the dramatist’s name was often known
as Marlin can leave no reasonable doubt that Marlowe is
here attacked as the writer of P amburlaine . Nor is there
anything in favour of another authorship. Even if, which
is doubtful, Sir John Suckling in The Goblins^ Act iv. i
(published 1646),^ intended to imply that Nicholas
Breton wrote P amburlaine^ his view can be discounted,
though it misled, of all people, Edmund Malone. Equally
unfounded is the attribution to Thomas Newton by
Edward Phillips in Pheatrum Poetarum (1675). Rogers and
Ley and Edward Archer in their play-lists of 1656, and
Francis Kirkman in his of 1661, had entered the two
Parts of Pamburlaine without an author’s name. But
Kirkman in his second list of 1671 had assigned it to
‘Chr. Marloe’. Phillips, therefore, as Gerard Langbaine
and Anthony Wood were quick to point out in 1691, had
no excuse for his error, and except Malone no one of
weight has since questioned Marlowe’s authorship.

It is therefore unnecessary to labour the internal
evidence. The arresting music of the blank verse, unique
in its combination of sonorous ring and liquid flow, the
cosmic imagery, the pervading impress of an endlessly
aspiring mind stamp both Parts of Tamburlaine with the
unmistakably authentic Marlovian signature. As any
annotated edition will show, there are a multitude of
passages linking the two Parts with the plays bearing
* See tamburlaine the Great, ed. Una EUis-Fermor, p. 14.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 71

Marlowe’s name on the title-page. It is scarcely too much
to say that the lines, Part II, Act ii. iv. 87-8,

I Helen, whose beauty summoned Greece to arms,

\ And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos,

compared with Doctor FaustuSy v. i. 107-8, and with Dido,
V. i. 146-8, would be sufficient to show that they all came
from the same pen.

The publication of the octavo of 1590 (entered in the
Stationers’ Register on 14 August) gives an upward limit
of date. Greene’s reference in the prefatory epistle to
Perimedes brings this down to 1588, and as Miss Ellis-
Fermor has pointed out, his gibing phrases seem to be
more fully applicable to Part II than to Part I.^ The date
appears to be still more narrowly fixed by the following
letter from Philip Gawdy to his father on 16 November
1587:

‘My L. Admirall his men and players having a devyse in ther playe
to tye one of their fellowes to a poste and to shoote him to deathe,
having borrowed their callyvers one of the players handes swerved
his peece being charged with bullett, missed the fellowe he aymed
at and killed a chyld and a woman great with chyld forthwith and
hurt an other man in the head very sore.’ 2

As the two tragical discourses’ of Famburlaine were
acted, according to the title-page, by the Lord Admiral’s
company, it can scarcely be questioned that the fatality
which he recounts took place during the performance of
Act V. i. 148 ff. of Part II, where the Governor of Babylon
is hung in chains upon the walls of the town and is shot at
by the besiegers. Marlowe’s last period of residence in
Corpus Christi College was for five weeks and a half
between Christmas 1586 and Lady Day 1587. He may,
as already suggested,^ have begun F amburlaine towards the
end of his Cambridge period. Otherwise both Parts must
have been written in the summer and autumn of 1587.

* Op. cit., pp. 6-8.

^ Quoted by Sir E. K. Chambers, T.L,S., 28 Aug. 1930, and in Eliz,
Stage, ii. 135, from Letters of Philip Gawdy, ed. I. H. Jeayes, p. 23.

^ See above, p. 27.

72 THE FIRST PART OF

Two objections, however, to that date have to be met.
Tamburlaine’s speech to his sons about fortifications in
Part II, Act III. ii. 62-82, is taken almost verbally from
a passage in Paul Ive’s Practise of Fortification^ published
in 1 589. F. C. Danchin, who first noted this, has therefore
concluded that Part II cannot be earlier than 1589, and
that Greene’s allusions were to Part I which Danchin
would assign to 1588.^ Miss Ellis-Fermor would get over
the difficulty by assuming that Marlowe had seen Ive’s
work in manuscript, especially as he was a Kentish man
and dedicated it to Sir Francis Walsingham.^

There has also to be noted another similar but more
extensive problem concerning both Parts of F amburlaine ,
In each of them there are considerable borrowings from
the early Books, especially the first, of Fhe Faerie Queene?
The two most notable are in Part II, Act iv. iii. 119-24:

Like to an almond tree ymounted high, &c.,

compared with F.Q. i. vii. 32, 11 . 5-9; and Act iv. i.
188-92:

As when an herd of lusty Cimbrian bulls, &c.,

compared with F.Q, i. viii. ii, 11. 5-8.

But Part I also borrows from Fhe Faerie Queene, e.g.
Act v. ii. 227-30:

O highest lamp of ever-living Jove, See.,

compared with F.Q. i. vii. 23, 11 . 1-5; and Act v. ii.
239-40:

Then let the stony dart of senseless cold, &c.,

compared with F.Q. i. vii. 22, 11 . 7-8.

In the light of these and other parallels Mincoff, like
Miss Ellis-Fcrmor in the case of The Practise of Fortifica-
tion, assumes that Marlowe must have seen part of The

* Revue Germanique, Jan.-Feb. 1912.

^ Op. cit., pp. 9-10.

^ See Marco K. Mincoff, Christopher Marlowe: A Study of his Develop-
ment, pp. 14-16 (1937, Sofia), following, in part, Schoeneich, Der litera-
rische Einjluss Spensers auf Marlowe (1907, Halle).

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 73

Faerie Queene in manuscript. We know from Spenser’s
correspondence with Gabriel Harvey that he had begun
his epic in 1580, but from that year till towards the close
of 1589 he was in Ireland. Is it likely that the young
Cambridge student would have had access to his un-
published work or felt at liberty to draw so freely upon
it? Fhe Faerie Queene (Books I-III) was entered in the
Stationers’ Register on i December 1589; the entry of
Famburlaine followed eight and a half months later. We
are learning more and more that Marlowe was an adept
at turning his reading quickly to dramatic use. I think it
probable that before Richard Jones published the first
edition of Famburlaine in the latter half of 1590, Mar-
lowe revised the two ^tragical discourses’ and inserted the
passages lifted with slight change from Spenser and Ive.
If they are looked at in their context, it will be found that
they can be detached from these and are little more than
embroidery. They need not, therefore, weigh against the
evidence of date supplied by Gawdy’s 1587 letter and
Greene’s 1588 allusions.

Moreover, the Famburlaine plays are linked to Dido
by metrical similarities and parallelisms of phrase which
favour a date as close as possible to Marlowe’s Cambridge
period. And as I shall try to show, there are other in-
sufficiently recognized traces of the influence of Marlowe’s
academic studies upon the first of the ‘tragical dis-
courses’ which when ‘shewed upon Stages in the Citie
of London’ took the public by storm.

The name of Famburlaine has been so long associated
with that of Marlowe as the first heir of his invention
produced on a public stage that we scarcely pause to
consider how it was that the young dramatist chose so
exotic a subject, so different from the themes of classical,
Italian, or British origin which had hitherto supplied the
chief material for tragedy or tragi-comedy in England.
Yet a close examination suggests that Marlowe’s Cam-
bridge studies and translations of Latin poetry may well
have led him to the choice of the career of the Scythian

74 THE FIRST PART OF

conqueror for his first play. Though the First Book of Lucan
has as its central theme the march of Caesar in 49 b.c.
from Gaul towards Rome, it takes in its sweep part of the
territories which fourteen centuries later were to be the
scene of Tamburlaine’s exploits. It was the defeat of
Crassus by the Parthians and his ‘wretched death’ at
Carrhae that broke up the triumvirate and that set in
motion, as Lucan laments, the train of events that
culminated in the Civil War. Romans turned on one
another the arms by which (19-20)

Scythia and wild Armenia had been yok’d,

And they of Nilus’ mouth.

So the chief centurion appeals to Caesar (368-9):

Well, lead us then to Syrtes’ desert shore,

Or Scythia or hot Libya’s thirsty sands.

And in Lucan’s later Books the civil war shifts to Greece
and Egypt and Asia Minor. From the moment that
Caesar crosses the Rubicon and cries (228-9):

Fortune, thee I follow.

War and the Destinies shall try my cause

till he attains supreme power after his triumphs at
Pharsalia, Thapsus, and Munda, his career is that of a
world-wide conqueror. And that Marlowe thought of
Caesar and Tamburlaine as warriors of similar breed is
shown by J Tamburlaine^ iii. iii. 153-6:

My camp is like to Julius Caesar’s host
That never fought but had the victory.

Nor in Pharsalia was there such hot war
As these my followers willingly would have.

Tamburlaine speaks of himself in terms of Roman
dignities when he cries to Theridamas (i. ii. 196-7):

Both we will reign as consuls of the earth,

And mighty kings shall be our senators.

And the lines that immediately follow show that be-
hind Marlowe’s reminiscences of Lucan and Roman

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 75

history there floated images from Ovid and classical
mythology (198-200):

Jove sometimes masked in a shepherd’s weed,

And by those steps that he hath scal’d the heavens,

May we become immortal like the gods.

The shepherd revealing himself as a god prefigures the
shepherd who in the play rises to earthly omnipotence.

The mythologists tell also of the overthrow of one
celestial dynasty by another, thus giving countenance to
similar revolutions on earth (ii. vii. 12-17):

The thirst of reign and sweetness of a crown,

That caused the eldest son of heavenly Ops
To thrust his doting father from his chair,

And place himself in the imperial heaven,

Mov’d me to manage arms against thy state.

What better precedent than mighty Jove ?

Thus Tamburlaine addresses the defeated puppet king
of Persia, Cosroe, who had boasted that he would over-
throw him as Jove had crushed the Titans (ii. vi. 1-8):

What means this devilish shepherd to aspire
With such a giantly presumption,

To cast up hills against the face of heaven.

And dare the force of angry Jupiter.?

But as he thrust them underneath the hills
And pressed out fire from their burning jaws.

So will I send this monstrous slave to hell.

Where flames shall ever feed upon his soul.

Thus Marlowe’s imagination was richly stored with
classical analogies when accounts of Tamburlaine’s
meteoric career fell into his hands. His chief source
appears to have been the Latin Magni Tamerlanis
Scythiarum Imperatoris Vita (1553) by Petrus Perondinus.
The description of Tamburlaine’s appearance in ii. i. 7-30,
beginning,

Of stature tall, and straightly fashioned
Like his desire, lift upwards and divine,

76 THE FIRST PART OF

is evidently based upon chapter xxi of the Vita by Peron-
dinus, De statura Tamerlanis et moribus eius, with the
omission of his lameness, and the addition of transfiguring
Marlovian touches. Perondinus’s whole conception of
Tamburlaine as a figure ‘insatiable, irresistible, ruthless,
destructive, but instinct with power’^ gives the cue
upon which Marlowe worked. It was not the aim of the
daring young dramatist to follow in the Senecan tradition
and to stress with appropriate moralizing the mutations
of Fortune./There is only one passage in which this theme
is dominant, v. ii. 285-309, where Zenocrate drives home
the lesson of the miserable fate of the captive Turkish
emperor and his wife. Here Marlowe is following another
source, Thomas Fortescue’s The Foreste or Collection of
Histories (1571), an English version, through the French,
of Pedro Mexia’s Spanish Silva de V aria Lection (1542),
which contained in Part II, chapter xxviii, the story of
Tamburlaine. The tragic fate of Bajazeth, which in
Fortescue’s words ‘might suffice to withdrawe men from
this transitorie pompe, and honour’, provokes the warning
from Zenocrate:

Those that are proud of fickle empery,

And place their chiefest good in earthly pomp,

Behold the Turk and his great emperess!

But such moralizing was incidental and was in contradic-
tion with the essential spirit of the play. In it Marlowe
achieved the revolution of bringing on the English public
stage a figure, who was not the sport of Fortune but her
lord; who held the Fates fast bound in iron chains, and
who throbbed with a stupendous vitality that made him
the fitting mouthpiece of the dramatist’s own tumultuous
energies and aspirations.

The Prologue heralds his appearance by assuring the
audience that they

shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine
Threatening the world with high astounding terms
And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

* Introduction to Tamburlaine^ by U. Ellis- Fermor, p. 31.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 77

But the stage is first occupied by a strangely different
figure, the Persian King Mycetes, a nerveless ruler, with
aesthetic susceptibilities, who holds ‘Tis a pretty toy to
be a poet’, and who is a feebler forerunner of Marlowe’s
Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II. Though he
deplores his lack of ‘a great and thundering speech’ with
which to voice his wrongs, he can make play with fanciful
images and conceits as he sends forth his ^chiefest captain’,
Theridamas, to do battle with Tamburlaine (i. i. 65 ff.):

Go frowning forth, but come thou smiling home,

As did Sir Paris with the Grecian dame

Go, stout Theridamas, thy words are swords.

And with thy looks thou conquerest all thy foes :

I long to see thee back return from thence,

That I may view these milk-white steeds of mine
All loaden with the heads of killed men,

And from their knees even to their hoofs below
Besmeared with blood that makes a dainty show.

But Theridamas yields to the Scythian’s ‘strong enchant-
ments’ and deserts to him, as does also Cosroe, the more
virile brother of Mycetes, planning himself to be King
of Persia, with Tamburlaine as his regent. But when
Mycetes has been defeated,^ Tamburlaine turns upon
Cosroe, whom he has made king only in sport, and takes
from him both his crown and his life. The fortunes of the
Persian royalties which fill the greater part of Acts I and
II do not in themselves move us much. But our ears are
enchanted with the billowy music of the verse, and with
the sonorous roll of eastern place-names to whose magic
Marlowe, like Milton after him, had the key.

Though in several of the scenes in these earlier Acts
Tamburlaine does not himself appear, yet through the
descriptions of him alike by friends and enemies, through

^ His opening speech in Act ii. iv, beginning, ‘Accursed be he that first
invented war’, expresses well the pacifist point of view. But his attempt
to hide the crown and his dialogue with Tamburlaine have an incongruous
air.

78 THE FIRST PART OF

the magnetism that he exerts, and through ‘the high
astounding terms’ of his proclamations, his figure swells
to more and more stupendous proportions. The panegyric
on his physical attributes, with comparisons to Atlas and
Hercules, a glorified version of the account by Peron-
dinus, has been noted above. It is put into the lips of the
Persian lord, Menaphon, and it is echoed by his royal
countryman, Cosroe (ii. i. 31-6):

Well hast thou pourtrayed in thy terms of life
The face and personage of a wondrous man:

Nature doth strive with Fortune and his stars
'Fo make him famous in accomplished worth:

And well his merits shew him to be made
His fortune’s master and the king of men.

And yet another Persian, Theridamas, cries at first
sight of him (i. ii. 154-6):

Tamburlaine! A Scythian shepherd so embellished
With nature’s pride and richest furniture!

His looks do menace heaven and dare the gods.

One of his Scythian followers, Techelles, exclaims when
he views him in full warlike array (i. ii. 52-4):

As princely lions when they rouse themselves,

Stretching their paws, and threatening herds of beasts.

So in his armour looketh Tamburlaine.

His own utterances arc pitched in a corresponding key.
In almost his first words he speaks of himself as one who
(i. ii. 38-40)

means to be a terror to the world,

Measuring the limits of his empery,

By east and west, as Phoebus doth his course.

He and his men (i. ii. 64-5)

in conceit bear empires on our spears
Affecting thoughts coequal with the clouds.

And in yet another of Marlowe’s favourite cosmological
parallels (i. ii. 173-6):

I hold the fates fast bound in iron chains.

And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about,

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 79

i And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere
Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

The magnetic effect of this magniloquence is proved in
the scene which brings Act II to an effective close when
Tamburlaine, after Cosroe’s defeat and death, crowns
himself King of Persia and is acclaimed by ‘alP :

Long live Tamburlaine, and reign in Asia!

And with a superb flourish he greets this popular
recognition (ii. vii. 65-7):

So; now it is more surer on my head
Than if the gods had held a parliament,

And all pronounc’d me king of Persia.

It was doubtless as a warrior victor of superhuman
mould that Tamburlaine took Elizabethan theatre-goers
by storm. But had he been no more than this he would
not have been truly representative of Marlowe’s genius.
Tamburlaine can not only, as has bcen-’seen, find Olym-
pian precedent for his limitless ambition, but in lines
where he is the mouthpiece of his creator he traces the
passion for sovereignty to the same ultimate source as
the insatiable scientific impulse (11. vii. 18-29):

Nature that fram’d us of four elements
Warring within our breasts for regiment,

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds;

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering planet’s course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres.

Will us to wear ourselves and never rest.

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all, \

That perfect bliss and sole felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.

Allied in Marlowe’s vision with the quest for power
and the quest for knowledge is the quest for beauty,
personalized for Tamburlaine in Zenocrate, the captive

THE FIRST PART OF

daughter of the Soldan of Egypt. Thus from the begin-
ning there blends with the Scythian’s martial grandilo-
quence a softer strain. Neither Perondinus nor Fortescue
speaks of Tamburlaine in his relation to women, but the
Byzantine historian Chalcondylas, whose account of the
Scythian was available to Marlowe in the Latin version
by Conradus Clauserus (1556),^ mentions his first wife.
Here was a hint of Teminine interest’, and the translator
of the Amores could not but remember that with a soldier
Cupid was only less potent than Mars.

The question, however, has to be asked — why does Mar-
lowe present Tamburlaine, when he first appears in Act I.
ii, as already enamoured of Zenocrate ? I would suggest,
in answer, that Marlowe was here influenced by Virgil,
who in the later part of his epic makes Aeneas, when he
comes to Italy, win the hand of Lavinia, the daughter of
King Latinus, who was already betrothed to Turnus,
King of Rutilia. Similarly, Zenocrate has been betrothed
to the King of Arabia, who in the last scene of Part I
does battle with Tamburlaine for his country and his
love. In the warning words of a messenger (v. ii. 316-20) :

th’ Arabian king,

The first affecter of your excellence,

Comes now as Turnus ’gainst Aeneas did.

Armed with lance into the Egyptian fields.

Ready for battle ’gainst my lord the king.

And Zenocrate herself prays for a similar issue to the
conflict as when

the gods to end the Trojans’ toil,

Prevented Turnus of Lavinia.

It is evident that Marlowe’s debt to the Aeneid is not
confined to his Dido.

Tamburlaine is at first no very devout lover. Zenocrate
seems to stir his imagination rather than his heart. She
is ‘lovelier than the love of Jove’, ‘fairer than whitest
snow’ ; she shall be drawn ‘with milk-white harts upon an

* Ethel Seaton in ‘Fresh Sources for Marlowe’ (R.E.S.y Oct. 1929) has
shown that Marlowe knew this work.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 8i

ivory sled’. Agydas, one of the Median lords escorting
Zenocrate, must have forgotten these flowers of speech
when in a later scene he warns her (iii. ii. 40-6):

How can you fancy one that looks so fierce,

Only disposed to martial stratagems ?

Who, when he shall embrace you in his arms.

Will tell how many thousand men he slew;

And when you look for amorous discourse,

Will rattle forth his facts of war and blood,

Too harsh a subject for your dainty cars.

Zenocrate’s reply proves that Tamburlaine can exercise
as potent an enchantment over women as over men.
Again Marlowe has recourse for the expression of passion
to the images of Ovidian mythology :

As looks the sun through Nilus’ flowing stream.

Or when the Morning holds him in her arms,

So looks my lordly love, fair Tamburlaine;

His talk much sweeter than the Muses’ song
They sung for honour ’gainst Pierides,

Or when Minerva did with Neptune strive;

And higher would I rear my estimate
Than Juno, sister to the highest god,

If I were matched with mighty Tamburlaine.

These high-flown classical parallels are wasted on
Agydas, who still pleads the cause of the young Arabian
king. Tamburlaine, who has meanwhile entered and over-
heard this dialogue, now takes Zenocrate (as the stage-
direction runs) ‘away lovingly by the hand looking wrath-
fully on Agydas, and says nothing’. The terror inspired
by Tamburlaine’s mere look is realized when Agydas
moans (iii. ii. 72-3):

Upon his brows was pourtrayed ugly death,

And in his eyes the fury of his heart.

Thereupon Techelles enters ‘with a naked dagger’ and
the grim exhortation:

See you, Agydas, how the King salutes you.

He bids you prophesy what it imports.

4427

82 THE FIRST PART OF

Characteristically argumentative to the end, with an
echo perhaps of some disputation in the Cambridge
schools on the value of words, Agydas retorts :

I prophesied before and now I prove
The killing frowns of jealousy and love.

He needed not with words confirm my fear,

For words are vain where working tools present
The naked action of my threatened end.

Therewith he takes his own life. But neither his Stoic
apologia for his suicide, nor the tributes of the Persian
lords, should divert attention from what is the only
dramatic justification of this curious episode, of Marlowe’s
own devising, that it is the first example (apart from the
fate of Cosroe in battle) of Tamburlaine’s terrible short
way with those who stand in his path. It is the first glimpse
of the sadistic element in his complex nature and it pre-
pares the audience for worse atrocities to come.

The decadent royal house of Persia has been an easy
prey to Tamburlaine, but in Act III he faces a more for-
midable enemy. Bajazeth, the Emperor of the Turks,
who has been on the point of crowning his victorious
career by the conquest of Constantinople, raises the siege
to stay the onset of Tamburlaine in Asia. In dispatching
beforehand a Basso with a threatening message to the
Scythian, Bajazeth speaks of himself in magniloquent
style as (iii. i. 23-6):

Dread Lord of Afric, Europe and Asia,

Great king and conqueror of Graecia,

The Ocean, Terrene and the coal-black sea.

The high and highest monarch of the world.

Yet in some subtle way the Turk’s braggadocio lacks
the dominant note that rings through Tamburlaine’s
utterances as in his proclamation of himself (for which his
biographers give warrant) to the Basso (iii. iii. 44-5) :

I that am term’d the Scourge and Wrath of God,

The only fear and terror of the world.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 83

When Bajazeth appears with his contributory kings and
his wife, Zabina, the dialogue for about one hundred lines
(ill. iii. 60-163) is cast in virtually strophic form, the
leaders on either side with their followers taking equally
balanced parts in an elaborate 'fly ting’. And when the
battle begins off-stage, the acrimonious strife of tongues
is continued for nearly another fifty lines by Zenocrate
and Zabina and their waiting-women. At last Bajazeth
has to acknowledge defeat, and Zenocrate places his im-
perial crown on Tamburlaine’s head. He then in the most
sweepingly grandiose of all his visions beholds himself
as master not only of the lands but of the seas, with his
Persian fleet and men-of-war sailing about the Indian
continent,

Even from Persepolis to Mexico,

And thence unto the Straits of Jubalter,

Where they shall meet and join their force in one,

Keeping in awe the Bay of Portingale,

And all the ocean by the British shore;

And by this means I’ll win the world at last.

The last lines seem to be almost an ironic anticipation
of the proud aims with which Philip of Spain was so soon
after the production of the play to send the Invincible
Armada to its doom. They would seem to be a fitting
climax to this Act, but for the groundlings a more
spectacular close was provided by the order to bind and
lead in the Turk and his empress. In their agony the pair
turn with execrations upon the Prophet who has betrayed
their trust in him :

Baj. Ah villains, dare ye touch my sacred arms ?

O Mahomet! O sleepy Mahomet!

Tjub. O cursed Mahomet, that makest us thus t
The slaves to Scythians rude and barbarous!

The barbarous humiliation of Bajazeth by carrying him
about like a wild beast in a cage is related by all the
authorities available to Marlowe, but the additional
outrage of his being made Tamburlaine’s footstool (iv.
ii. i) seems to be taken from Perondinus. It is not men-

84 THE FIRST PART OF

tioned by Fortescue, who at this point abridges Mexia’s
Spanish original.^ In fantastic contrast with the primitive
savagery of his treatment of his victim, Tamburlaine as
‘he gets up upon him to his chair’ again emblazons himself
in celestial imagery (iv. ii. 33-40):

Smile, stars that reign’d at my nativity,

And dim the brightness of their neighbour lamps :

Disdain to borrow light of Cynthia,

For I, the chiefest lamp of all the earth,

First rising in the east with mild aspect.

But fixed now in the meridian line,

Will send up fire to your turning spheres,

And cause the sun to borrow light of you.

It is a steep descent from this glowing vision to the curt
command, ‘Put him in again’, and the order to Zabina
to feed him with scraps from the conqueror’s board. The
banquet scene (iv. iv) in which Bajazeth’s humiliation is
elaborated is partly written in crude prose (11. 32 ff.) and
may be a remnant of those ‘fond and frivolous gestures’
of which the publisher complained. But if this be so the
interpolation testifies to the delight of ‘vain, conceited
fondlings’ in these monstrosities. Their cup was doubtless
filled to the brim when in Act v. ii. 241 Bajazeth brains
himself against his cage, and Zabina seeks the same fate
after a frenzied outburst in which there arc singular
anticipations at once of Lady Macbeth and of Ophelia :

‘Let the soldiers be buried. Hell, death, Tamburlaine, hell.
Make ready my coach, my chair, my jewels. I come, I come, I
come!’

* Miss Ellis-Fermor in her edition of Tamburlaine^ p. 140, note, states
that Raleigh in his History of the fVorld, The Preface, ed. 1820, ii, p. xiii,
recalls this scene from the play, when he writes, ‘God, who is the Author
of all our tragedies, hath written out for us, and appointed us all the
parts we are to play: and hath not in their distribution, beene partiall to
the most mighty Princes of the world . . . that appointed Bajazet to play
the Gran Signior of the Turkes in the morning and in the same day the
Footstoole of Tamerlane.^ This seems to be an echo of iv. ii. i ‘Bring out
my footstool’. Yet it must be noted that the camp has now moved from
Bithynia to Damascus, that it is not ‘the same day’, and that Raleigh
uses the form Tamerlane as in Perondinus.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 85

With the Persians and the Turks overthrown, the
Soldan of Egypt remains to confront Tamburlaine, who
keeps his daughter captive and who has laid siege to his
city of Damascus. Even when warned of his power and
ruthlessness the Soldan pours contempt on him (iv. i.

65-8):

Merciless villain, peasant, ignorant
Of lawful arms or martial discipline;

Tillage and murder arc his usual trades.

The slave usurps the glorious name of war!

And with Ovidian parallels on his lips the Soldan goes
forth Vith streaming colours’ to relieve his beleaguered
city from ^this presumptuous beast’ (iv. iii. 1-6) :

Methinks we march as Meleager did.

Environed with brave Argolian knights.

To chase the savage Calydonian boar;

Or Cephalus, with lusty Theban youths.

Against the wolf that angry Themis sent
To waste and spoil the sweet Aonian fields.

Joined with the Soldan is the King of Arabia to whom
Zenocrate has once been pledged. Her fears arc, however,
not for him but for her father and her country. In vain
she pleads with Tamburlaine to raise the siege of Damas-
cus and make a truce with the Soldan (iv. iv. 67 ff.).
Tamburlaine, after the fashion reported by his bio-
graphers, has already changed the colour of his tents from
the merciful white of the first day to the red of the second,
with himself ‘all in scarlet’,’^ portending death to all com-
batants. And at the opening of Act V, on the third day, as
the Governor of Damascus laments, the tents have taken
on ‘the last and cruel’st hue’.

His coal-black colours, everywhere advanced,

Threaten our city with a general spoil.

In vain four virgins with branches of laurels in their
hands come forth to plead with Tamburlaine ‘all in black
and very melancholy’. He greets them with the derisive

^ ‘Tamberlane’s breeches of crymson velvett’ are included in an inventory
made on 13 March 1598. Henslowe Papers, ed. Greg, p. 120.

THE FIRST PART OF

cry, ‘What, are the turtles frayed out of their nests ?’ and
orders his horsemen to show them

my servant Death

Sitting in scarlet on their armed spears.

This massacre of the innocents which Fortescue associ-
ates with the siege of an unnamed ‘strong and riche citie’
is legitimately transferred by Marlowe to the assault on
Damascus. But it is a glaringly unsuitable prelude to the
immediately following lyric invocation of ‘fair Zenocrate,
divine Zenocrate’, mounting line by line to the superb
rhapsody, in which the romantic impulse, ever yearning
after an unrealizable ideal of perfection, finds its expres-
sion once and for ever (v. ii. 98-1 10) :

If all the pens that ever poets held

Had fed the feeling of their masters’ thoughts,

And every sweetness that inspir’d their hearts,

Their minds and muses on admired themes;

If all the heavenly quintessence they still
From their immortal flowers of poesy,

Wherein as in a mirror we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit —

If these had made one poem’s period,

And all combin’d in beauty’s worthiness.

Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,

Which into words no virtue can digest.

Did Marlowe himself recognize how incongruous such
words were on the Scythian’s lips when he made him
break into an apology for harbouring ‘thoughts effeminate
and faint’, and utter the plea that every warrior ‘must
needs have beauty beat on his conceits’ ?

Little wonder that Zenocrate is distracted between the
barbarous deeds and the honeyed speeches of her captor or
that her ‘martyred soul’ is torn by divided loyalties, when
the Soldan and the King of Arabia arrive to do battle with
Tamburlaine (v. ii. 326-7):

My father and my first betrothed love
Must fight against my life and present love.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 87

The issue, as has been seen above, is modelled on that
at the close of the Aeneid, The Arabian king dies on the
field like Turnus, and Tamburlaine comes to terms with
the father of Zenocrate as Aeneas with the father of
Lavinia. But there is no Virgilian echo in the Scythian’s
defiant boast (v. ii. 388-94):

The god of war resigns his room to me,

Meaning to make me general of the world;

Jove, viewing me in arms, looks pale and wan.

Fearing my power should pull him from his throne.
Where’er I come the fatal Sisters sweat.

And grisly Death, by running to and fro.

To do their ceaseless homage to my sword.

If Marlowe had already thought of a sequel to this play,
in this insensate challenge to the deities he may have
foreshadowed the end when Tamburlaine himself has to
yield to Death. But for the present his victims carry his
glory to the depths and heights of the universe (v. ii.

403-5):

Hell and Elysium swarm with ghosts of men
‘ That I have sent from sundry foughten fields
To spread my fame through hell and up to heaven.

The crowning of Zenocrate as Queen of Persia and the
preparations for the solemnization of the marriage rites
between her and Tamburlaine bring the play to a trium-
phant close.

THE SECOND PART OF
TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT

T he resounding success of Marlowe’s play on Tambur-
laine evidently led to an instant popular demand for
a sequel. But how was it to be provided ? The young
dramatist had already used up practically the whole of the
material which Fortescue and Perondinus and others sup-
plied for the Scythian’s career. The invention of entirely
original episodes was never to be one of his major quali-
fications as a playwright. But he could turn to his pur-
poses the fruits of his extensive Cambridge reading. The
classical poets were at his hand to supply further parallels
and decorations. The geographical details of Tambur-
laine’s more or less historical campaigns could not well be
duplicated in a second Part, but with Abraham Ortelius’s
atlas, "Theatrum Orbis "Terrarum^ before him, the dramatist
could associate striking place-names with imaginary mili-
tary exploits.^ History could be similarly manipulated.
Who among the London theatre-goers knew or cared any-
thing about the details of Oriental annals ? Marlowe felt
himself free to exercise some chronological legerdemain
and to dovetail incidents of Turkish history into the later
fortunes of Tamburlaine. Miss Seaton has proved beyond
doubt that Marlowe was well acquainted with the
Chronicorum Turcicorum tomi duo by Philippus Lonicerus,
of which the second edition had appeared at Frankfurt in
1578.2 In this edition he would also find reprinted
Antonii Bonjinii Rerum Ungaricarum decades tres (1543),

* See ‘Marlowe’s Map’, by Ethel Seaton, in The English Association
Essays and Studies^ vol. x (1924). The Eheatrum Orhis E err arum was first
published at Antwerp in 1574.

^ In T.L.S.y 16 June 1921, and ‘Fresh Sources for Marlowe’, R.E.S.,
Oct. 1929.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 89

together with Callimachi Experientis de clade Varneyisi
Epistola. These relate that King Vladislaus of Poland and
Hungary swore a truce with the Sultan Amurath II, and
afterwards violating his oath marched into Turkish terri-
tory while the Sultan was attacking the King of Car-
mania. Vladislaus paid the penalty of his treachery by his
defeat in the battle of Varna, 1444. Marlowe substitutes
Sigismund of Hungary for Vladislaus ; Orcanes, King of
Natolia, for Amurath II; and Tamburlaine for the King
of Carmania. In the most solemn fashion on the banks
of the Danube, in i. ii. 56 ff., Sigismund sw^cars by ‘sweet
Jesus Christ’ and Orcanes by ‘sacred Mahomet’ to ‘keep
this truce inviolable’. But in ii. i Frederick of Buda and
Baldwin of Bohemia persuade Sigismund to break his
oath. And here Marlowe puts into the lips of the two
lords the arguments with which Cardinal Julian, as re-
ported by Bonfinius,^ had justified the breach of faith
with the Turks ( 11 . 33 ff.):

Bald. with such infidels

In whom no faith nor true religion rests,

We are not bound to those accomplishments
The holy laws of Christendom enjoin.

Fred. And should we lose the opportunity

That God hath given to venge our Christians* death,
And scourge their foul blasphemous paganism,

As fell to Saul, to Balaam, and tlie rest.

That would not kill and curse at God’s command,

So surely will the vengeance of the highest.

And jealous anger of his fearful arm.

Be pour’d with rigour on our sinful heads.

If we neglect this offered victory.

Similarly, when Orcanes hears that the Christians are
advancing against him, he displays, like Amurath II at
Varna, the broken treaty, and in words borrowed mainly
from Bonfinius^ adjures the God of the Christians to

* De Rer. Ung, Dec. Ill, Lib. VI, pp. 457-9, quoted by Una Ellis-
Fermor, op. cit., pp. 206-7 ^ P* 4^^*

4427

90 THE SECOND PART OF

avenge the outrage which His followers have offered to
His name (ii. ii. 39):

Then, if there be a Christ, as Christians say,

But in their deeds deny him for their Christ,

If he be son to everliving Jove,

And hath the power of his outstretched arm,

If he be jealous of his name and honour,

As is our holy prophet Mahomet,

Take here these papers as our sacrifice,

And witness of thy servant’s perjury.

This is dramatically appropriate on the lips of the Turk.
But in his revolt against the orthodoxy of his age Mar-
lowe may well have taken an ironical pleasure in an
episode which showed the followers of Mahomet in favour-
able contrast with those who bore the name of Christ.
Yet this is not all. Breaking loose suddenly from Bon-
finius, Marlowe, with one of his characteristic upward
flights, makes Orcanes invoke the God (ii. ii. 49-52) '
that sits on high and never sleeps.

Nor in one place is circumscriptible.

But everywhere fills every continent
With strange infusion of his sacred vigour

and is ‘of endless power and purity’. It is a conception of
the Deity, as Miss Bradbrook has pointed out,^ akin to
Sir Walter Raleigh’s as of ‘an understanding, which only
itself can comprehend, an essence eternal and spiritual’.

Till after the defeat of Sigismund in ii. iii Tamburlaine,
as in the earlier scenes of Part I, plays a relatively passive
part, though his temper is unchanged, for to Zenocrate’s
question, ‘When wilt thou leave these arms ?’ he answers
(i. iv. 12-14):

When heaven shall cease to move on both the poles.

And when the ground, whereon my soldiers march.

Shall rise aloft and touch the horned moon.

Yet if Marlowe took any account of chronology many
years must have passed since Tamburlaine’s exploits in

* The School of Night (1936), pp. 106-7.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 91

Part I. For his three sons by Zenocrate are now nearing
military age and he is preoccupied with their future
(11. 21 ff.):

methinks their looks are amorous,

Not martial as the sons of Tamburlaine;

Their fingers made to quaver on a lute,

Their arms to hang about a lady’s neck.

Their legs to dance and caper in the air.

The two younger boys satisfy him by their protestations
that they will become like him the scourge and terror of
the world. But the eldest, Calyphas, infuriates him by
his pacifist plea with which Marlowe adroitly sounds a
softer note amidst the clang of trumpets and drums. From
his parental cares Tamburlaine turns in scenes v and vi
to welcome his generals and tributary kings, Theridamas,
Techelles, and Usumcasane, now gathering to his standard
for the conflict with Orcanes. Here Marlowe had recourse
to the map of Ortelius for supplying details of imaginary
campaigns by the three generals. Techelles, in particular,
by the recital of his march (i. vi. 59-78), including Zanzi-
bar, ‘the western part of Afric’, confounded all commenta-
tors, who thought Marlowe as revolutionary in geography
as in theology, till Miss Seaton discovered that Ortelius
had given the name of Zanzibar to a western province of
Africa.^

The clash of arms is hushed for a time in ii. iv, where
Tamburlaine reappears as the poet-lover, bending over
the bed of state where Zenocrate lies dying. Again, as in
passages of Part I,^ the blank verse falls into almost strophic
form in the lines 1 5-33 wherein Tamburlaine pictures her
advent in heaven, with the refrain, ‘To entertain divine
Zenocrate’. Then with a new note of complete self-
surrender he pleads (11. 55-6):

Live still, my love, and so conserve my life.

Or, dying, be the author of my death;

* Marlowe* s Map, pp. 16-18.

^ See above, p. 83.

92 THE SECOND PART OF

whereto she makes the antiphonal response:

Live still, my lord ; O let my sovereign live !

But let me die, my love; yet, let me die:

With love and patience let your true love die.

Never does Marlowe come so near to striking a note
of pure tenderness as in this scene where Zenocrate dies
to the sound of music, kissing her lord and blessing her
‘sweet sons’. The episode is of the dramatist’s own
imagining, but echoes from the classical poets were
floating through his brain and inspired the dithyrambic
outburst (ii. iv. 85-91):

Her sacred beauty hath enchanted heaven.

And had she liv’d before the siege of Troy,

Helen, whose beauty summoned Greece to arms,

And drew a thousand ships to Tenedos,

Had not been nam’d in Homer’s Iliads,

Her name had been in every line he wrote.

As Helen was to Marlowe the incarnation of absolute
beauty this was his supreme tribute. But the translator
of Ovid was impelled to add, even though in anticlimax :
Or had those wanton poets, for whose birth
Old Rome was proud, but gazed a while on her,

Nor Lesbia nor Corinna had been nam’d;

Zenocrate had been the argument
Of every epigram or elegy.

So it is with classical imagery that Tamburlaine bids
his generals bring Zenocrate back to him by haling the
fatal Sisters from the infernal vaults, or by shivering the
starry firmament where Jove means to make her the queen
of heaven. Then for the first time the Scythian hears
from the lips of Theridamas that there are limits to his
power (ii. iv. 119-20):

Ah, good my lord, be patient ! she is dead,

And all this raging cannot make her live.

He must content himself with carrying her body wherever
he goes in a golden coffin, and with burning down the
town where she has breathed her last.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 93

From this flaming spectacle, which must have taxed the
scenic equipment of the company, Tamburlaine turns
abruptly (iii. ii. 53 ff.) to give his sons a lecture on ‘the
rudiments of war’, in particular the methods of carrying
a besieged city by assault, borrowed from Paul Ive’s
Practise of Fortification.^ When Calyphas again shows the
white feather, Tamburlaine gives him a further lesson in
soldiering by cutting his own arm :

A wound is nothing, be it ne’er so deep;

Blood is the god of war’s rich livery.

To Calyphas it is a pitiful sight, but his younger brothers
are eager to offer their arms to the knife.

Marlowe may have wished to point an ironic contrast
between the recreant heir of Tamburlaine and Callapine,
the son of Bajazeth, who, having bribed his keeper to
help him to freedom, joins Orcanes after his victory
over Sigismund and in iii. i is crowned emperor by the
tributary kings, who, with the aid of Ortelius’s map, have
gathered forces from many parts to oppose the Scythian’s
advance. The two armies come face to face in iii. v, and
as in Part I, Act iii. iii, the battle is preluded by a contest in
‘flyting’ between the rival leaders. This opens superbly
with Marlowe again turning to his own purpose a romanti-
cized version of Greek epic story, ^ when Tamburlaine
cries (iii. v. 64-74) :

Ye petty kings of Turkey, I am come,

As Hector did into the Grecian camp,

To overdare the pride of Graecia,

And set his warlike person to the view
Of fierce Achilles, rival of his fame.

I do you honour in the simile;

For if I should, as Hector did Achilles,

(The worthiest knight that ever brandished sword)
Challenge in combat any of you all,

I see how fearfully ye would refuse.

And fly my glove as from a scorpion.

^ See above, p. 72.

^ The episode was a post-Homeric addition. Miss Ellis-Fermor points
out that Marlowe may have found it in Lydgate’s Troy Book, iii. ii. 3755

94 THE SECOND PART OF

A dozen magical lines transforming the two supreme
figures of the Iliad into the likeness of jousting knights
of medieval chivalry ! Thence it is a steep descent to the
abusive railing between the commanders on either side,
including some apparent gags in prose.

When at last the battle is joined off-stage in Act iv. i,
Calyphas, despite the taunts of his younger brothers,
lingers in his tent, declaring (11. 27-9) :

I know, sir, what it is to kill a man;

Tt works remorse of conscience in men,

I take no pleasure to be murderous.

The lines gain added significance from our knowledge
that Marlowe himself was in September 1589^ to be put
on trial for his part in a fatal affray. And in what follows
there seems to be an anticipation of Falstaff’s apologia on
the field of Shrewsbury (iv. i. 45 ff.):

Take you the honour, I will take my ease.

The bullets fly at random where they list;

And should I go and kill a thousand men,

I were as soon rewarded with a shot,

And sooner far than he that never fights;

And should 1 go and do nor harm nor good,

I might have harm, which all the good I have
Join’d with my father’s crown, would never cure.

But inaction cannot save Calyphas from harm. Tambur-
laine returning victorious stabs him to death for cowardice,
justifying his unnatural deed in terms more suited to an
academiclecture-room thana Scythiancamp(iv.i. 1 1 1-15) :
Here, Jove, receive this fainting soul again,

A form not meet to give that subject essence.

Whose matter is the flesh of Tamburlaine,

Wherein an incorporeal spirit moves.

Made of the mould whereof thyself consists.

He denounces Jupiter for sending

to my issue such a soul
Created of the massy dregs of earth,

^ See below, pp. loi ff.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 95

whereby he has made of Tamburlaine a greater enemy
than the mountain-hurling Titans. Yet a moment after-
wards he proclaims himself (iv. i. 15 1-2)

arch-monarch of the world,

Crown’d and invested by the hand of Jove,
and announces that (199-201)

till by vision or by speech I hear
Immortal Jove say ‘Cease my Tamburlaine’,

I will persist a terror to the world.

Somewhat irrelevantly intermingled with the above
episodes are three scenes (iii. iii and iv, and iv. ii) con-
cerned with the Captain of Balsera, his wife, and his son.
Marlowe was here apparently indebted to Belleforest’s
story in his Cosmographie Universelh\ ii. 750, of the
Governor of Rhodes and his mistress,^ and less directly
to Ariosto’s account in Orlando Furioso^ cantos xxviii and
xxix, of Isabella and Rodomont.^ But in iii. iii, where
Theridamas and Techelles summon the Captain to yield
up the fort, Marlowe takes another opportunity of dis-
playing his knowledge of military technicalities, especially
regarding siege methods. When in the next scene, after
the Captain’s death, his wife Olympia kills their son to
save him from the Scythian’s cruelty, she may be in-
tended as a foil to the gentle Zenocrate.

’Twas bravely done and like a soldier’s wife,
exclaims Techelles, who saves her from suicide and carries
her to Tamburlaine’s camp. Here in Act iv. ii by a strata-
gem akin to that by which Isabella foils the advances of
Rodomont she lures Theridamas, who has become deeply
enamoured of her, to give her a fatal wound. And as a
pendant to Tamburlaine’s vision of the heavenly powers
entertaining Zenocrate is Theridamas’s vision of Hell
glorified by the advent of Olympia (iv. ii. 87-96):

Now hell is fairer than Elysium.

A greater lamp than that bright eye of heaven
From whence the stars do borrow all their light
* Quoted by Ethel Seaton, ‘Fresh Sources for Marlowe’, R.E.S., Oct.
1929, pp. 395-6. ^ See Una Ellis-Fermor, op. cit., pp. 44-5*

96 THE SECOND PART OF

Wanders about the black circumference;

And now the damned souls are free from pain,

For every Fury gazeth on her looks;

Imperial Dis is courting of my love,

Inventing masks and stately shows for her,

Opening the doors of his rich treasury
To entertain this queen of chastity.

Lines of such sombre splendour would redeem the most
irrelevant of excrescences.

It is a crudely grotesque transition to the next scene
where Tamburlaine appears drawn in his chariot by two
of the conquered kings, Vith bits in their mouths, reins
in his left hand, and in his right hand a whip with which
he scourgcth them’. This barbaric episode repeated in
intensified form the resounding theatrical hit in Part I
of Bajazeth being carried about in a cage and used as
his victor’s footstool. And this second appeal by Marlowe
to the sadistic instincts of his audience, not based, as
before, on his sources but of his own invention, proved
even more successful than the first. Not the most notorious
ejaculations of Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy gained
wider reclame^ as we know from the lips of Ancient Pistol
and others, than Tamburlaine’s rebuke to his sluggish
human steeds (iv. hi. 1-2):

Holla, ye pampered jades of Asia!

What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day ?

With this monstrous mode of transport his objective now
is Babylon, but beyond it he sees himself riding in triumph
through his native city of Samarcand. Once again he can
find no lesser parallel than Jove on his passage through
the firmament (iv. hi. 125-32):

Then in my coach, like Saturn’s royal son
Mounted his shining chariot gilt with fire.

And drawn with princely eagles through the path
Pav’d with bright crystal and enchas’d with stars.

When all the gods stand gazing at his pomp.

So wiU I ride through Samarcanda streets.

Until my soul, dissevered from this flesh.

Shall mount the milk-white way, and meet him there.

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 97

With this characteristic flourish, closing Act IV, Tam-
burlaine for the first time recognizes that even for him
there must at last be an end of his career on earth. Yet
in his final exploit, the capture of Babylon, he fills the
measure of his savageries to the brim. The Governor
tarnishes the glory of his brave defence of the city by
seeking to save his life by revealing the secret of the gold
hidden in the neighbouring lake. Deaf to his plea Tam-
burlaine has him hung in chains upon the walls, and bids
his followers shoot him to death. ^ He hangs up, too, the
broken-winded jades, the kings of Trebizond and Zoria,
and bridles in their stead the two ‘spare kings’ of Natolia
and Jerusalem. He orders the ‘burghers’ to be bound
hand and foot and thrown into the lake, and their wives
and children to suffer the like fate. Then he gives to
the flames (v. i, 172-5)

the Turkish Alcaron
And all the heaps of superstitious books
Found in the temples of that Mahomet
Whom I have thought a god.

It is significant that Marlowe should here fly in the face
of the historians who depict Tamburlaine as showing
favour to the temples of the Prophet. All orthodox forms
of religion come in turn under the dramatist’s lash. As
Christianity had been put to scorn in Act II by the
perfidy of its adherents, so Mohammedanism is now made
a mock through the helplessness of its Prophet to avenge
the millions of his followers slain by Tamburlaine, or to
save his sacred writ from the flames (v. i. 191-8):

Why send’st thou not a furious whirlwind down,

To blow thy Alcaron up to thy throne,

Where men report thou sitt’st by God himself,

Or vengeance on the head of Tamburlaine
That shakes his sword against thy majesty,

And spurns the abstracts of thy foolish laws ?

Well, soldiers, Mahomet remains in hell:

He cannot hear the voice of Tamburlaine.

* On P. Gawdy’s letter referring to this episode see above, p. 71.

4427

98 THE SECOND PART OF

It is the voice not of Tamburlaine but of Marlowe, in
realistic derision of direct divine intervention in human
affairs, and repeating from ii. ii. 49, ‘he that sits on high
and never sleeps’, the conception of a transcendent deity:

Seek out another Godhead to adore;

The God that sits in heaven, if any god,

For he is God alone, and none but he.

Then once again, in v. iii, we hear the voice of Tambur-
laine himself, who, stricken with sudden sickness, threatens
war against heaven (11. 42 ff.) :

What daring god torments my body thus.

And seeks to conquer mighty Tamburlaine.?

Come, let us march against the powers of heaven.

And set black streamers in the firmament.

To signify the slaughter of the gods.

Yet when Techelles seeks to comfort him with the assur-
ance that his malady is too violent to last, he confesses
that he is mortal:

Not last, Techelles! no, for I shall die.

His slave. Death, is tremblingly creeping nearer him, but
will be scared away if Tamburlaine keeps him busy on the
field of battle. Then in contrast with these imaginative
flights Marlowe characteristically introduces a detailed
report, in the medical terminology of the day, on Tambur-
laine’s condition. It is not, however, the physician, but
a messenger announcing the advance of the Turkish forces
who provides the Scythian with a medicine to ‘recure’ his
pain. For the last time he fights and is victor but has not
strength to pursue the foe. He calls for a map — it must
have been the Theatriim Orbis Terrarufn which had done
yeoman service to Marlowe — ^wherein he traces his past
conquests and contemplates enterprises still unfulfilled,
including what seem to be prophetic anticipations of the
cutting of the Suez Canal and the discovery of Australia.
These he leaves as legacies for the future to his two sons.
The terms in which the trio emphasize their essential unity

TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT 99

(v. iii. 164-74) again savour of the philosophic lecture-
room rather than of the camp.

The reluctance of Amyras to assume his father’s state
strikes a more natural note, and the bringing in of Zeno-
crate’s hearse at Tamburlaine’s bidding to ‘serve as parcel’
of his funeral reminds us that he had been a lover as well
as a warrior. But he is the Scythian savage when, after
crowning his heir, he bids him (v. iii. 229-30)

scourge and control those slaves,

Guiding thy chariot with thy father’s hand.

The only classical parallels for which it is hard to forgive
Marlowe are those in which Tamburlaine warns Amyras
to beware lest ‘these proud rebelling jades’ should drag
him to a fate like that of Phaeton or Hippolytus.

It is merely the extravagant of Amyras that in the
closing couplet can pronounce the elegy:

Let earth and heaven his timeless* death deplore,

For both their worths will equal him no more.

For in Part II of Tamburlaine the protagonist is a coarser
and more incredible figure than in Part 1 . There even the
brutalities to Bajazeth and the massacre at Damascus
could do no more than blur the resplendent picture of
a world-conqueror whose ambition was in essence the
divine intoxication of the spirit and the senses which is
the creative fount of all the arts. And in Part II some-
thing of this radiant image survives. By the deathbed of
Zenocrate Tamburlaine appears as the poet-lover, and
even when his hands are red with blood, phrases of pure
gold flow ever and again from his lips. But through the
later acts of Part II he becomes more and more the primi-
tive barbarian, heaping outrage upon outrage and chal-
lenging the very deities whose instrument he had claimed
to be. A Macbeth driven from crime to crime by a brood-
ing sense of guilt and haunted by imaginative terrors; a
Lear goaded to madness by encountering obstacles upon

* untimely.

100 TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT

which his imperious will is broken — these were destined
after the turn of the century to become figures of tragic
grandeur. But in their fate there is nothing akin to Tam-
burlaine’s cumulative enormities or his frenzied defiance
of mortal limitations. His career closes at last merely
because all that live must die, and he looks forward to its
continuation by his sons.

It is in other ways than in the presentation of Tambur-
laine himself that Part II shows a ripening of Marlowe’s
powers as a dramatist. There is less concentration of
interest upon the central figure. Many of the subordinate
characters are little more than puppets, but the con-
trast between Tamburlaine’s eldest son and his brothers
and between Zenocrate and Olympia, though not fully
developed, indicates the use of a wider canvas than before.

What is more notable is the technical advance in the
manipulation of source-materials. Instead of following
more or less closely in the track of Fortescue and Perondi-
nus, Marlowe now borrows in turn from Lonicerus and
Bonfinius, from Belleforest and Ariosto, and welds them
together for his purposes, though in the borrowings from
Paul Ive and in some other technical passages there is
more than a suspicion of ‘padding’. So dexterous was his
use of the map of Ortelius that the secret has been dis-
covered only after three centuries and a half. Behind his
exposure of the weaknesses of Christianity and Islam we
seem to come closer than before to his own creed. And
what is more fundamental in Marlowe than any religious,
or irreligious, belief, his passion for beauty embodied in
classical legend and myth irradiates, as has been seen, with
flashes of dazzling splendour even the most murky and
ensanguined episodes of Part II of T amburlaine the Great.
The play may thus fitly claim to be the counterpart in the
western world of the Scythian conqueror’s mausoleum in
Samarkand, with its brilliant interior adornment of marble,
precious stones, arabesques in turquoise, and inscriptions
in gold.*

* ^he ^imeSy 20 Jan. 1939.

VII

LIFE IN LONDON

THE BRADLEY AFFRAY AND NEWGATE

T here is a remarkable contrast between the large
amount of evidence extant concerning Marlowe’s
career at Cambridge and the almost complete dearth of
it for his first two years in the capital after his triumph
on the stage with the T amburlaine plays. And when the
earliest record of him for this period leaps to light it is
startlingly at variance with the certificate of the Privy
Council in 1587 that in all his actions he had behaved
himself orderly and discreetly.

It has taken exactly half a century for the full signifi-
cance of this record to be gradually pieced out. In 1886
J. C. Jeaffreson in his Middlesex County Re cords y i. 189,
translated and summarized an entry in the Middlesex
Sessions Roll 284, i October, 3 1 Elizabeth (15 89), according
to which ‘Richard Kytchine’ and ‘Humfrey Rowland’
became sureties that Christopher Marley of London,
gentleman, should appear at the next sessions of Newgate
to answer charges against him. On 18 August 1894 in
The Athenaeum Sidney Lee identified the Christopher
Marley of this entry as the dramatist. In 1926 Leslie
Hotson threw new light upon the two sureties,^ but it
was not till 1934 that Mark Eccles discovered that it was
no less serious a charge than homicide upon which Mar-
lowe had been arrested and held to bail.^

The documents in which the whole story is unfolded
are in the Public Record Office among the Chancery
Miscellanies, Bundle 68, file 12, no. 362, consisting of a
writ and a return into Chancery of a Gaol Delivery at

^ In ‘Marlowe among the Churchwardens’, Atlantic Monthly, July
1926. ^ Marlowe in London^ pp. 9 ff.

102

LIFE IN LONDON

Newgate, reciting the Coroner’s inquest, together with
a Pardon contained in the Patent Rolls for Elizabeth,
part 4, C 66/1340, and the Sessions Roll 284 in the
Middlesex Guildhall mentioned above. The opening part
of the finding at the inquest held by Ion Chalkhill, with
a jury of twelve ‘probi et legales homines’, on 19 September
1589 runs as follows:

‘Vbi . . . willelmus Bradley et quidam Cristoferus Morley nuper
de London gcnerosus vicesimo octavo die Septembris Anno
vicesimo primo [Regine Elizabcthe] fuerunt insimul pugnantes in
quadarn vcnella vocata hoglanc in parochia Sancti Egidij extra
Creplcgate . . . inter boras secundam et terciam post meridiem
eiusdem dici. Ibi intervenit eisdem die et anno et infra boras
predictas quidam Tbomas Watson nuper de London generosus
super clamorem populi ibidem a[d]stantis ad separandum prefatos
willelmum Bradley et Cbristoferum Morlep sic pugnantes et ad
pacem dicte domine Regine conservandam. Et gladium suum earn
ob causam tunc ct ibidem extraxit. Super quo prefatus [Cbristo-
fcrus]^ Morley seipsum retraxit Sc a pugnando desistit. Et super
boc predictus willelmus Bradley videns eundcm Tbomam Watson
sic intervenientem ibidem cum gladio suo extracto dixit ei in bis
Anglicanis verbis sequentibus videlicet (arte tbowe nowe come
then I will baue a boutc w’^^ tbee).’

Bradley then, according to the sworn statement of the
jury, so beset and maltreated Watson with a sword in one
hand and a dagger in the other that to save his life Watson
had to retreat to a ditch and turning at bay gave Bradley
a wound with his sword in the right breast of which he
instantly died. And the jury found that he had killed
him in self-defence.

Who were the persons involved in this fatal affray, and
what was the sequel? Eccles has supplied the answers.
William Bradley was the son of the landlord of the Bishop
Inn at the corner of Gray’s Inn Lane and Holborn. In
the summer of 1589 he had asked for sureties of the peace
against Hugo Swift, John Allen, and Thomas Watson of
whom, according to the formula, he went in fear of his

The document has by mistake ‘will[elmus]’.

THE BRADLEY AFFRAY AND NEWGATE 103

life.^ Bradley had thus some cause of quarrel with Thomas
Watson, who must have been the poet of that name, the
author of ^EKarofiTraOla, for Hugo Swift was his brother-
in-law. Watson was a friend of Thomas Walsingham of
Scadbury, Kent, to whom he dedicated his Meliboeus in
1590, and who three years later is known to have been
a host to Marlowe. I do not put as much weight as
Eccles on the Walsingham link between the two men, and
Kyd does not mention Watson among Marlowe’s friends.^
But as poets, dramatists, and translators the two had much
in common and, as will be seen, there are further circum-
stances that justify the belief that the Christoferus Motley
of the inquest is Christopher Marlowe, the playwright.

Thus another record discovered by Eccles^ not only calls
him by the more familiar name but reveals his place of
residence as what was in 1589 the main theatrical neigh-
bourhood. The Middlesex Sessions Roll 284 which
begins with Marlowe’s recognizance ends with ‘a sort of
matriculation register’ of the prisoners who arrived in
Newgate between 9 September and 2 October 1589. It
includes the following entry:

Thomas Watson nuper dc Nor- quiducti fueruntGaolexviij^dic
ton ffowlgate in Comitatu Septembrisper Stephaiium wyld
Middlesex generosus & Christo- Constabularium ibidem pro Sus-
ferus Marlowe nuper de Eadcm picione Murdri viz pro Morte
yoman [blank’] et Commissi fucrunt per

Owinum Hopton Militcm.

This shows that Watson and Marlowe were neighbours in
the suburban district of Norton Folgate, close to the
Shoreditch playhouses The Theater and The Curtain^
where it was convenient for dramatists and actors, in-
cluding Shakespeare in his earlier London years, to live.
It is curious that while Watson is called ‘generosus’
Marlowe, though a university graduate, is here described

^ The record in the Queen’s Bench Controlinent Rolls found by J.
Hotson is quoted by Eccles, op. cit., p. 57.

^ See below, p. 112. ^ Op- P- 34 *

LIFE IN LONDON

104

as ^yoman’. Was it because he was a shoemaker’s son?^
In any case after Bradley’s death they were for a time
treated alike. They were arrested by the constable who
dealt with affrays in Hog Lane, Stephen Wyld, who
brought them before Sir Owen Hopton, Lieutenant of
the Tower, then living in Norton Folgate. Hopton com-
mitted them both to Newgate. On the following day the
Coroner’s jury found that Watson had killed Bradley in
self-defence. But this did not at once set him or Marlowe
free. Watson was confined in Newgate till the Gaol
Delivery at the Old Bailey on 3 December, when the
Coroner’s inquisition was laid before the Middlesex
justices who remanded him again to prison to await the
Queen’s pardon which was granted on 12 February
1589/90, after he had endured the rigours of Newgate
for nearly five months.

Marlowe, who had no part in the actual homicide, was
in prison for less than a fortnight, as he was admitted to
bail on i October. But short as his confinement was there
is a curious echo of it outside the Newgate calendar.
Among the charges brought against him in 1593 by
Richard Baines was the intention to coin money about
which he had learnt from ‘one Poole a prisoner in newgate
who hath great Skill in mixture of mettals’.^ It was
tempting to see in ‘one Poole’ the Robert Poole or Poley
who was to be with Marlowe on the day of his death.
But Eccles has shown^ that he was a John Poole who had
been confined in Newgate on or before July 1587 on
suspicion of coining, and who remained there for several
years. The inference, in my opinion, must further be
drawn that the allegations of Baines, however exaggerated,
cannot be dismissed as mere inventions.

‘ Similarly Ben Jonson is called ‘yoman’ in the indictment against him
for the manslaughter of Gabriel Spencer on 22 Sept. 1598. In relation
to the episode Henslowe writing to Allen calls him ‘bengeman Jonson
bricklayer’ {Ben Jonson^ ed. Herford and Simpson, i. 18 n. and 219).

^ See below, pp. 251-2.

^ ‘Marlowe in Newgate’, in T.L.S.y 6 Sept. 1934.

THE BRADLEY AFFRAY AND NEWGATE 105

The recognizance may be summarized in English as
follows:*

‘Richard Kytchine of Clifford’s Inne, gentleman, & Humfrey
Rowland of East Smithfeilde in the countj^ aforesaid, homer, came
before me, William Fletewoode, Serjeant at Law and Recorder of
the City of London, one of the Justices of our Lady the Queen
appointed in the county aforesaid, & became sureties for Chris-
topher Marley of London, gentleman : to wit, each of the sureties
aforesaid under the penalty of twenty pounds, and he, the said
Christopher Marley, undertook for himself, under penalty of
forty pounds ... on condition that he the said Christopher shall
personally appear at the next Sessions of Newgate to answer every-
thing that may be alleged against him on the part of the Queen,
and shall not depart without the permission of the Court.’

The bail was heavy and was not forfeited. A marginal
memorandum on the recognizance, added by the clerk,
‘reu Sc deP per proclam’ was first noted by Eccles and
interpreted as reuertitur et deliberatur per proclamacionem^
implying that Marlowe had presented himself at the Old
Bailey on 3 December and had been discharged by the
Court ‘by proclamation’ after hearing the Coroner’s in-
quisition. It was a formidable Bench before which to
appear, consisting of four Judges, including the Master
of the Rolls and Sir Roger Manwood, Chief Baron of
the Exchequer; the Lord Mayor, William Fleetwood the
Recorder of London, and two Aldermen; Robert Wroth
of Enfield and other Middlesex justices. As he stood in
court Marlowe could not foresee that by the end of
December 1592 he would be writing an epitaph on
Manwood,^ whose country scat was near Canterbury, and
that Fleetwood before his death in 1594 was to buy one
of the early editions of T amhurlaine ^

Who were Marlowe’s two sureties ? The investigations
of Tucker Brooke^ and Hotson,^ supplemented by those

^ A facsimile of the Latin original is given by J. H. Ingram, op. cit.,
p. 149. The text in expanded form is reproduced by Tucker Brooke, op.
cit., pp. 96-7. ^ See below, p. 237-8.

^ John Bakeless, op. cit., pp. 160-1, 341. Op. cit., pp. 41-2.

5 ‘Marlowe among the Churchwardens.’

io6 LIFE IN LONDON

of Eccles,* have identified them. Richard Kitchen came
from Skipton in Yorkshire where his family had long been
in the service of the Cliffords. He entered Clifford’s Inn
before his marriage to Agnes Redman in January 1579/80,
for in the licence he is described as Richard Kitchen, Gent,
of Clifford’s Inn. In Hilary term 1586 he appears as
attorney for Thomas Meeres of Kent and thenceforward
in a number of cases of very varied interest. In one of
these, in a deposition on 15 April 1591, he describes him-
self as of Great St. Bartholomew’s near Smithfield. This
tallies with an assessment of five shillings on his land in
that parish in 1588, the year before he became a surety
for Marlowe. Five years later he was himself the principal
in a similar episode to that of the Hog Lane affray, though
it had not a fatal termination. On ii April 1594 he was
indicted at the Guildhall for an assault on John Finch,
and after the case had been removed to the Queen’s
Bench it was discharged in 1595/6.

Richard Kitchen’s many-sided activities may have
brought him later into relation with Philip Henslowe.
Though there were other legal Kitchens he is probably
meant when on 9 August 1598 Henslowe lent Richard
Alleyn eight shillings and sixpence ‘to geuc the atorney
ceachen for the bande w""*" he hade in his hande’, and also
‘layd owt for hime the same time to m*" ceatchen’ fifty
shillings.^ In any case it was Marlowe’s surety who gave
evidence in a Star Chamber case, on i June 1600, on
behalf of William Williamson, landlord of the Mermaid
Tavern in Bread Street, who had declined to provide music
on a previous March evening for a company of revellers.
Eccles stretches a point when he asserts that, ‘since Kitchen
knew the host of the Mermaid, he must have known
Shakespeare and Jonson as well as Marlowe’, but it is a
plausible speculation. In November 1604 Kitchen died,
leaving his house in Skipton to his wife for her life and
his other goods and chattels to her absolutely.

* Op. cit., chap, iv, ‘Marlowe’s Sureties*.

^ Eccles, op. cit., p. 86, quoting from Henslowe' s Diary, ed. Greg, i. 205.

THE BRADLEY AFFRAY AND NEWGATE 107

Humphrey Rowland was of inferior station and less
substance. In the recognizance he is called a ‘horner’,
and in the parish register of St. Botolph’s church, Aid-
gate, ‘hornbreaker’. In a letter of the Lord Mayor, 30 June
1583, in answer to one from Lord Burghley asking per-
mission for Rowland, ‘a very honest poore man’, to be
admitted to the Cutlers’ Company, he is more specifically
described as ‘a maker of Lanterne homes’. He also made
shoeing horns, for the Barber-Surgeons granted him in
September 1586 a lease of a house in East Smithfield at
an annual rent of six pounds on condition that he delivered
eighteen of them to the Company every year frank and free.

He had been a householder in St. Botolph’s parish as
early as 7 November 1571, when his son Edmund was
christened. From that date till 1593 the church registers
record christenings and burials of his many children by
his first wife, Mary, who was herself buried on 27 February
1585/6, and his second wife, Eve Ashe, whom he married
on the following 4 May. There are also entries of the
burials of several of his servants.

Though he was one of the constables for East Smithfield
for several years including 1585, he was in that year, as
is shown by an entry in the King’s Bench Controlment
Rolls, summoned to answer for ‘quibusdam transgressis
& cxtorcionibus’ and he was outlawed in the following
Hilary term. Notwithstanding, he was elected a church-
warden of St. Botolph’s on II December 1586 for two
years. This appointment together with the size of his
family and household would seem to argue a fair degree
of prosperity, but in 1598 his goods were assessed at only
three pounds, upon which he paid a tax of eight shillings,
and when he died in January 1600/1 his estate came to
only thirty-five shillings and his widow renounced the
administration. It is one of the minor mysteries of Mar-
lowe’s career how this East Smithfield maker of lanterns
and churchwarden should have been one of his sureties
and been accepted for the considerable sum of twenty
pounds.

io8

LIFE IN LONDON
II

FIRST CHARGES OF ATHEISM

When Christopher Marlowe waited out of the Old Bailey-
after his discharge on 3 December 1589, he had suffered
the unpleasant experiences of an arrest on suspicion of
murder and of nearly a fortnight’s confinement in New-
gate. Yet otherwise up to this date, so far as our evidence
goes, Marlowe at each successive turn of his career had
been singularly fortunate. He had obtained a scholarship
at the King’s School just before he would have become
ineligible. After an unusually brief attendance there he
had been chosen by John Parker to hold one of his father’s
scholarships at Corpus Christi College. He had taken
his Cambridge B.A. within the shortest legal limit. He
had held his scholarship at Corpus Christi for the maxi-
mum period of six years, though before the end of this
period he must have decided against a clerical career.
He had been given some temporary government employ-
ment in which he had acquitted himself so well that the
Privy Council had taken the very unusual step of directing
the University authorities not to delay the conferment
on him of the M.A. degree. While yet in his twenty-
third year he had won such an instant triumph with his
first play performed on a public stage that he had been
obliged to follow it at once with a second Part, though
he had really used up his original materials for Tambur-
laine’s career. And in the latter part of 1589 he was
probably busy upon The Jew of Malta^ with which he
was to have another immediate theatrical success. Even
when he was involved in one of the affrays which were
so common a feature of Elizabethan life, his luck did not
desert him. Though he was Bradley’s first antagonist, it
was Watson, the intervener, who killed the innkeeper’s
son, and had to endure five months of Newgate before
he was pardoned, while Marlowe came off compara-
tively lightly. There was apparently in December 1589
nothing to indicate that he was doomed to meet within

FIRST CHARGES OF ATHEISM 109

a few years as tragic a fate as any of the protagonists in
his dramas.^

Yet a cloud perhaps at the time no bigger than a man’s
hand had already appeared in the sky. The times were
critical, with the Queen’s government constantly faced
by perils at home and abroad. It was dangerous for any
man to step outside the bounds of the Elizabethan via
media in Church and State. Marlowe had already incurred
in certain quarters the suspicion of intending to join the
Roman Catholic recusants abroad. Now a deadlier charge
was beginning to make itself heard against him. The term
‘Atheism’ had in the sixteenth century much of the
sweeping sinister associations that ‘Bolshevism’ has in the
twentieth. It was a useful slogan with which to denounce
doctrines or actions that challenged constitutional eccle-
siastical or secular authority. Thus among ‘certain ob-
jections’ laid before the Privy Council against the
admission of George Gascoigne, the poet and satirist,
to be a burgess of Parliament it is alleged that ‘he is
a notorious Ruffianne and especialli noted to be bothe a
spie, an atheist and godlesse personne’.^

That Marlowe, while he was in residence at Cambridge,
had come under the suspicion of being ^an atheist and
godlesse personne’ seems to me to be most improbable.
The extension of his scholarship to the full limit and the

‘ The documentary evidence of Marlowe’s residence in London be-
tween September and December 1589 is alone sufficient to dispose of a
suggestion made by E. St. John Brooks in ‘Marlowe in 1589-92.'*’ {T.L.S.y
27 f'eb. 1937). Lady Shrewsbury, writing to Burghlcy on 21 Sept. 1592,
stated that ‘one Morley’, who had attended at Hardwick on her grand-
daughter, Lady Arabella Stuart, ‘and read to her for the space of three
years and a halP, had been dismissed because he was discontented and
because Lady Shrewsbury had of late ‘some cause to be doubtful of his
forwardness in religion’. Brooks suggested that ‘one Morley’ was Christo-
pher Marlowe, and that he had been recommended by the Privy Council
as tutor to Lady Arabella, who stood in close succession to the Crown. But a
doubt about ‘forwardness in religion’ is something very different from the
charges of ‘atheism’ against Marlowe which now begin to claim attention.

^ State Papers {Domestic), vol. Ixxxvi. no. 159. I owe this reference
to C. T. Prouty.

LIFE IN LONDON

signing of his ‘supplicat’ for the M.A. by the Master of
Corpus Christi are in my opinion conclusive evidence to
the contrary. It has indeed been recently proved from
the College Buttery books that Francis Kett, who had
been a Fellow of the College from 1573 to July 1580,
remained in residence during the earlier part of 1581 after
Marlowe had entered.^ But a young freshman was not
likely to come into contact with a senior man no longer
in an oflScial position. It is very improbable, therefore,
that Kett had any influence on Marlowe, though the
heresies with which he was charged in later years and for
which he suffered death at Norwich on 14 January 1588/9
are of the Arian type to which the dramatist was after-
wards inclined.^

Just before Marlowe took his M.A. in July 1587 there
came to Corpus Christi College Thomas Fineaux or
Phineaux. It is apparently to him that Henry Oxinden
refers in his note ‘Marloe had a friend named Phineaux
at Dover, whom he made an Atheist, but who was made
to recant.’ But of his later career at Cambridge or else-
where there seems to be no record.

The other later Kentish admirer of Marlowe, Simon
Aldrich, who entered Trinity College, Cambridge, about
1593,4 told Oxinden ‘that Marlowe was an Atheist and
wrote a book against the Scriptures, how that it was all
one man’s making; and would have printed it, but it
could not be suffered to be printed’.

These memoranda are important as traditional links,
though scanty, between the dramatist and men of his
own county and university, but they do not imply that
Marlowe’s ‘atheism’ dated back to his Cambridge days.
Yet the violation by the Archbishop’s scholar of the
understood obligation to take holy orders and his sensa-
tional d^but immediately afterwards as a London play-
wright must have caused no little scandal. And it was

* Bakeless, op. cit., p. 50. ^ See below, pp. 111-12.

3 On Oxinden’s memoranda see above, p. 19.

4 See above, p. 19.

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FIRST CHARGES OF ATHEISM m

natural that some of the most challenging tirades of his
first tragic hero should be interpreted by unfriendly hearers
as the utterances of the dramatist himself. Among these,
as has been seen in discussing the date of the T amburlaine
plays, was Robert Greene, ^ who at St. John’s College had
been Marlowe’s senior at Cambridge by two years, and
who was envious of the younger man’s triumph in the
theatre while his own only venture as yet was Ho palter
up some thing in Prose’. The first known use of the term
‘Atheist’ in any connexion with Marlowe is the phrase
from the preface to Perimedes the Blacksmith in 1588, ^
‘daring God out of heaven with that Atheist T amburlan\
followed by the sneer at ‘mad and scoffing poets, that
have propheticall spirits as bred of Merlins race’. Here
Greene evidently insinuates that the atheism of Tambur-
laine was characteristic of the ‘scoffing’ poet, his creator,
versed in the black art of his namesake, the wizard
Merlin.

A much more serious and illuminating allegation of
atheism was to be made against Marlowe by his chief rival
as a tragic dramatist, Thomas Kyd. And its importance
lies in the fact that it arose out of the personal contact of
the two men. In circumstances to be discussed later Kyd
was arrested on 12 May 1593.^ Among his papers were
found fragments of a disputation which the authorities
endorsed as ‘vile hereticall conceiptes denyinge the deity
of Jhesus Christe o*’ Savio*^’. This is in itself a sufficiently
accurate description, but the discovery brought upon Kyd
the charge of atheism against which he protested in an
undated letter, written after Marlowe’s death, to the
Lord Keeper, Sir John Puckering. He there asserts that
the fragments belonged to Marlow^e and that they were
‘shuffled w^^ some of myne (vnknown to me) by some
occasion of o’" wrytinge in one chamber twoe yeares synce’.
This dates the association of the two dramatists at least
as far back as the early summer of 1591.

The object of the treatise was to deny the divinity of

^ See above, pp. 69-70. ^ See below, p. 242.

II2 LIFE IN LONDON

Jesus Christ. It quotes texts from the New Testament
Epistles calling God Tuerlasting, Inuisible, Incomutable,
Incomprehensible, ImortalP, and maintains that if ‘Jhesus
Christ euen he which was borne of Marie was God so
shall he be a visible God comprehensible & mortal!’, which
is a contradiction. It has been shown* that the fragments
found in Kyd’s possession are part of an anonymous
treatise quoted in full for purposes of confutation by John
Proctor in 1549 ^ hook called The Fal of the Late

Arrian, And good reason has been given^ for concluding
that the ‘late Arrian’ was John Assheton who had
denied the doctrine of the Trinity, had been examined
by Archbishop Cranmer in 1549, and had afterwards
recanted.

It is surprising evidence of the range of Marlowe’s
reading that he had once in his possession these portions
of a heretical treatise more than thirty years old by an
obscure parish priest. And it shows how wide an interpre-
tation could be given to atheism if charges of it could be
brought against Kyd and Marlowe based on this Socinian
disputation. How far it may have at all approximated to
Marlowe’s views will be discussed later.

It is fortunate that in support of his assertions Kyd
asks Puckering to inquire of those with whom Marlowe
‘conversed’, Harriot, Warner, Roydon, and some stationers
in Paul’s Churchyard. Whether the Lord Keeper ap-
proached them or not, we must be grateful for getting
this short list of the dramatist’s intimates. The St. Paul’s
stationers must include Edward Blount, whose shop was
in the Churchyard, and who was in 1598 to publish Hero
and Leander with an effusive tribute to the author’s
memory .3 qphe identity of Warner is doubtful. The
association of his name in the letter with that of Harriot
suggests that he was Walter Warner, the mathematician.

* By VV. Dinsmore Briggs in ‘A Document concerning Christopher
Marlowe’, Studies in Philology, April 1923.

^ By George T. Buckley in ‘Who was the Late Arrian?’, Mod. Lang.
Notes, Dec. 1934. ^ See below, p. 282.

FIRST CHARGES OF ATHEISM 113

But he may have been William Warner, the poet, in
whose AlhiorCs England there is a definition of the nature
of the deity^ not unlike that in the treatise of ‘the late
Arrian’ and in E amburlaine^ Part II, ii. ii. 49-53.

Thomas Harriot, an Oxford graduate, was four years
senior to Marlowe. He had been taken by Sir Walter
Raleigh into his household as a mathematical tutor, and
in 1585 accompanied his expedition to Virginia. In 1588
he published A Brief and Erue Ref or t of this ‘newfound
land’, displaying his powers of scientific observation and
lucid statement. This was his only publication during his
lifetime; his important work on algebra was edited by
Walter Warner in 1631, ten years after his death. Modern
investigation has somewhat tardily done increasing justice
to his achievements in mathematics, astronomy, and optics
where he may be mentioned in association with some of
the greatest names. These were the studies, disturbing
to traditional conceptions of the universe, that excited
suspicions among the orthodox of the period. Harriot
and his employer were widely credited with keeping
a ‘School of Atheism’ in the latter’s house. It is to Harriot
that the Jesuit pamphleteer, Robert Parsons, refers in his
Responsio ad Elizabethae edictum (1592) as ‘Astronomo
quodam necromantico’, the preceptor of the ‘schola
frequens de Atheismo’. The English summary of the
Responsio has the entry:

‘Of Sir Walter Rawleys school of Atheisme by the waye, & of the
Conjurer that is M[aster] thereof, and of the diligence vsed to get
yong gentlemen of this schoole, where in both Moyses, & our
Sauio* **, the olde, and the new Testamente are iested at, and
the schoUers taughte, amonge other thinges, to spell God back-
warde.’

The ‘Conjurer’ here is, of course, Harriot, and a year later
Richard Baines was to accuse Marlowe of affirming ‘that
Moyses was but a lugler and that one Heriots being Sir

* See M. C. Bradbrook, The School of Nighty pp. 65-6.

4427 Q

LIFE IN LONDON

1 14

W. Raleighs man Can do more then he’.^ It was of
Harriot too that Thomas Nashe was thinking when he
declared in Pierce Pennilesse (1592): ‘I heare say there be
Mathematicians abroad, that will prove men before
Adam.’ This finds support in Harriot’s manuscript papers
which include calculations about the chronology of
Genesis. And according to Baines, Marlowe similarly
was of opinion that ‘the Indians and many Authors of
antiquity haue assuredly writen of aboue 16 thowsande
yeeres agone, whereas Adam is proued to have lived within
6 thowsand yeares’.

But so far as has been discovered, in spite of some
tantalizing coincidences of names, there is no mention of
Christopher Marlowe in Harriot’s voluminous papers.^
The ‘Morly’ who drew Harriot’s attention to a point to
be considered, in working with the planisphere of Gemma
Frisius seems to have been Captain Edmund Marlowe,
author of Ars Naupegica^ from which Harriot took notes,
and whom he mentions in the entry ‘I invented this
Feb. 28^*' 1607-1608 and gave it to E. Marlow for Mr.
Baker the shipwrite’. Captain Edmund is also probably
the ‘Mr Mario’ in a short list of names, including ‘Mr
Alisbury’, i.e. Thomas Ailesbury, who was secretary to
two Lord High Admirals, and whose association with
Harriot was later than Marlowe’s death. And a more
intimate reference among ‘remembrances’ to ‘a horse for
Kit’ seems to be concerned not with Kit Marlowe, but
with one of Harriot’s servants, either Christopher Tooke
or Christopher Kellett.

Of Matthew Roydon, the other friend of Marlowe
named by Kyd, it is preferable to speak later. ^ But what-
ever may have been Marlow’s degree of intimacy with
persons popularly suspected of heresy, and whatever
rumours may have begun to circulate about his own
atheism, his career, except for his arrest and fortnight’s

* See below, p. 251.

^ On the points that follow see John Bakeless in T.L.S., 2 Jan. 1937,
and the comments by Ethel Seaton, ibid., 5 June 1937. ^ pp. 243-4.

FIRST CHARGES OF ATHEISM 115

imprisonment in September 1589, seems to have run
prosperously from his success with the T amburlaine plays
till the spring of 1592. Nor was there then any check to
the flow of his genius, but during the last year of his life
clouds increasingly blackened his firmament, presaging the
final tragedy of 30 May 1593.

VIII

ROBERT POLEY

PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT: 1585-8

At this point it is advisable to bring into the narrative
jtx, of Marlowe’s fortunes the enigmatic figure of Robert
Poley, who was to be one of the actors in the tragedy of
Deptford, who in his tortuous career was brought into
relation with members of the dramatist’s circle, and who
probably knew something of him personally before their
last fatal meeting, though of this there is no documentary
proof. In any case Poley’s equivocal activities as a Govern-
ment agent and his double-faced attitude to recusants
and plotters throw vivid light on the feverish and turbulent
atmosphere in which suspicions of treasonable intentions
by Marlowe, whether in his Cambridge or London days,
might easily be roused and entertained.

In tracing the career of Robert Poley we are again faced,
though in a less degree than with Christopher Marlowe,
with the difficulties arising from variant Elizabethan
spellings of proper names. Poley appears as ‘Pooley’,
Tollye’, ‘Poole’, and ‘Pole’, and allusions to him in the
State Papers have thus been indexed as if they referred
to different persons. But there were also other Poleys or
Pooles, among them John Poole the Newgate prisoner
and coiner; another John Pooley who was in the service
of the Earl of Essex; and Edmund Poley, nephew to Lord
Wentworth.^ References therefore merely by surname
can only be identified with Robert Poley if the circum-
stances appear to be relevant.

He may have been the Robert Pollye who matriculated
as a sizar from Clare College, Cambridge, in Michaelmas
1568, and who had perhaps been a chorister at King’s in

* See Ethel Seaton in R.E S (Jan. 1931), p. 88, with references to
CaL S, P.

PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT 117

1564.^ He was a man of education, but, so far as I know,
neither in his own statements nor in contemporary allu-
sions to him is there any reference to a connexion with
Cambridge. In any case he does not seem to have taken
a degree. There is a plausible, though not conclusive,
reason for identifying him as the ‘Master Pooley’ who was
in the service of Lord North in 1578.^ But our first cer-
tain knowledge of him is in the earlier part of 1583. It
is derived from a deposition by Richard Ede, apparently
lodge-keeper at the Marshalsea, in a case against Poley for
alienating the affections of Joan, the wife of William Yeo-
mans, a London cutler. The case came in January 1588/9
before William Fleetwood, the London Recorder who in
the December of the same year was to be on the Bench
when Marlowe was set free after the killing of Bradley.
Ede deposed that on a date not specified in 1583 Poley
was committed by Sir Francis Walsingham to the Marshal-
sea and remained there till the loth of May following.
One half of the time he was a close prisoner ; and the other
half he had ‘the liberty of the house’. Fie made use of
this ‘enlargement’ to entertain Mistress Yeomans at ‘fine
bankets’ in his chamber, while refusing to have anything
to do with his own wife, who often tried to see him. This
ill-used lady (as we learn from Yeomans) was ‘one Wat-
son’s daughter’, and was married to Poley by a seminary
priest in the house of one Wood, a tailor dwelling in Bow
Lane, who circulated prohibited books like l^he Execution
of Justice and T^he Treatise of Schism,

Whatever the reason for Poley’s committal to the
Marshalsea, he cannot have been in want of money at
this time, for he entrusted Mistress Yeomans with ^no
of ‘good gould’. After a time he sent Mistress Ede to
borrow ^3 from Yeomans, who was not at home. Mistress
Yeomans, however, sent him back by the messenger
of his own money. Yeomans afterwards sent by his
brother another ^3, and when Mistress Ede declared that

* Ethel Seaton in R.E.S. (Apr. 1931), p. 147, quoting from John and
J. A. Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses. ^ See below, p. 123 n.

ii8 ROBERT POLEY

the money had already been received by Poley, Yeomans
thought his wife had robbed him and was angry with her.
But when Poley came out of prison the matter was ex-
plained, and Ede brought about a reconciliation, con-
firmed by a gift from Poley to Yeomans of a silver bowl
double gilt, and to Ede of two angels for his pains in the
matter. But the intrigue between Poley and Joan Yeo-
mans continued, and to facilitate it she arranged for him
to have a chamber at the house of her mother, a widowed
Mistress Browne.

Apparently, however. Mistress Browne did not suspect
the guilty relations between her daughter and Poley, which
had a remarkable sequel. One of the deponents who
gave evidence before the Recorder on 7 January 1588/9
was Agnes Hollford, wife of Ralph Hollford, hosier. She
deposed that on a Friday about Shrovetide, 1585, she met
Mistress Browne, mother of Mistress Yeomans. Mistress
Browne told her that ‘one Mr. Policy laye in her howse,
and her daughter comminge to her howse to drye clothes’
she ‘fownde her daughter sittinge vpon the said Polleys
knees, the syght thereof did soe stryke to her hart that she
shoulde never recover yt. She prayed God to cutt her of
verie quickly or ells she feared she shoulde be a bawde
vnto her owne daughter.’ Her prayer was quickly
answered, for when Mistress Hollford called on Mistress
Browne on the Monday following she found her ‘departed
and readie to be caried to the Church to be buried, she
dyinge vppon the Saterdaie before’. Even this divine
visitation, however, did not, as will be seen, put a stop to
the relations between Poley and Mistress Yeomans.

By 1585, however, Poley had become associated with
a very different circle from that of the London cutler and
his wife. Charles and Christopher Blunt (or Blount) were
younger brothers of William, seventh Lord Mountjoy.
Charles, who was a favourite of Elizabeth, succeeded to
the title in 1594, and afterwards became Earl of Devon-
shire and Lord Deputy of Ireland. Christopher was
Master of the Horse to Lord Leicester, whose widow he

PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT 119

married about 1589. He was knighted for his military
services in Flanders in 1587-8. He afterwards took part
in the ill-fated campaign of the Earl of Essex in Ireland,
and in the abortive conspiracy against Elizabeth, for which
he was executed on 18 March 1601. This was the culmi-
nation of a long series of treasonable practices. By 1585
Christopher Blunt, who became a convert to Roman
Catholicism, had thrown himself ardently into the plots
on behalf of the unfortunate Queen of Scots. For this
purpose he chose as his agent Robert Polcy, as appears to
be first mentioned in a letter from Thomas Morgan to
Mary, dated 10 July 1585. Morgan, one of Mary’s agents
abroad, was at this time a prisoner in the Bastille, but he
was able to communicate in cipher with the Queen of
Scots, then at Tutbury in the custody of Sir Amias Poulet.

‘Aboute fiftene dayes past or thcreaboutes, there arrived here
a speciall messenger from London, sent hither expresselye by
Mr. Blunt vnto me with letters, declaring by the same that he was
bound to serve & honor the only Sainct that he knowes living vppon
the grownd — so he termed your majestic . . . which bringcr of
Blunt his letters is a gentleman & named Robert Poley. 1 am, as
I was, still prisonner & he cold not be permitted to have accessc
vnto me.’

Poley, however, refused to deal with Morgan through
any intermediary, ‘declaring that he wold not deliver his
charge to none living till he spake with my selfc or hard
me speak’. Some of Morgan’s friends became apprehen-
sive, beginning ‘to dout the sayd Poley was sent by Eng-
land to practise my death in prison by one mcanes or
other’. Morgan, however, was not influenced by their
fears:

‘I fownd the mcanes to have him conducted as nerc as might be
to the window of the chamber where I am a prisoner, and through
the window I spoke so moch to him as satisfied him, who at tlic
last delivered the letters where I appoynted, & so they came to my
handes with ample Instrucions of the state of England . . .

‘And so vppon conference and conclusion with the sayd Poley
I fownd nothing but that he ment well, and a Catholike he showeth

120

ROBERT POLEY

himselfe to be, and moch disposed to see some happye Sc speedye
reformation in that state ... I have retorned Poley in fine well
contented and confirmed, I hope, to serve your majestic in all he
may, but I wrote not one line with him, but signified that Blunt
shold heare from me by some other meanes.’

The last words suggest that Morgan did not trust Poley
fully, but in any case he got him recompensed for ‘his
viage and charges hither’. He persuaded the Archbishop
of Glasgow to send Poley 30 pistolets through Charles
Paget.

‘He hath reccaved the same, & is gone to England wher he pro-
mised Paget to do some good offices, Sc prayed him to assure me
thereof, for I cold not be permitted to speak with him but once,
as I tolde you alredye.’

Morgan’s caution in not communicating with Blount
through Poley proved fruitless. For as Charles Paget,
another fervent adherent in Paris of the Queen of Scots,
wrote to Mary on 15 July, Poley himself on his first arrival
there ‘committed an error in writing hence to Mr.
Christopher Blunt’ and ‘sent it by an ordinary messenger,
so that it was taken’. This is confirmed on 18 July by
Morgan: ‘I hear that the said Poleys letters were inter-
cepted at the port in England and sent to the Council.’
In all probability Poley did not ‘commit an error’ but
deliberately arranged that the correspondence should fall
into the hands of the English Government.

Exactly six months afterwards, on 18 January 1586,
Morgan gives further news of Poley :

‘Hert [i.e. Charles Paget] and I recommend the French Em-
bassador some English in London to doe him some pleasure &
service there and amongst others one Robert Poley who hath geven
me assurance to serve and honor your majestic to his power being
but a poore gentleman. He is moch at Chr[istopher] Blunt his
devotion and both of them do travell to make an intelligence for
your majestie. The sayd Embassador Sc his Secretarye Courdaillot
have sithence theyr arrivall in London reported well to Hert and
to my selfc of the sayd Poley who hath bene heretofore in Scotland
Sc knoweth the best wayes to passe into Scotlande. If you know not

PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT 121

how to be better served for conveyance to Scotland you may cause
the Embassador to addresse the sayd Poley with your letters into
Scotland. But order must be taken to make his charges in such
viages. And if your majestic will have him to remayne in some
place nerer for your purpose Sc service he will accommodate him-
self accordinglye to your pleasure. He is a Catholikc and Blunt
has placed him to be Sir Phillipp Sydneys man that he may more
quietlye live a Christian life vnder the sayd Sydney.’

What an exquisite compliment to the preux chevalier
of the Elizabethan age (though the Calendar of the
Scottish State Papers cynically omits it)! But it was of
course not with Poley’s progress in the religious life that
Mary’s supporters were concerned. They secured him a
place in Sidney’s service because on 20 September 1583
Sir Philip had married Frances, daughter of Sir Francis
Walsingham, and had taken up his abode in his father-in-
law’s house. Poley would thus be in a favourable position
for learning ‘Mr. Secretary’s’ movements and plans.

In a later letter to the Queen of Scots, dated 21 March
1586, Morgan states this without any disguise:

‘Having written thus farre I rcceaved letters out of England
from London from Poley, in my former letters mentioned, wlio
writeth vnto me that he hath bene in the partes where your
majesty remayneth, and there addressed the meanes to convey
such letters as I commended to his care to serve to make an in-
telligence with your majesty. We have applyed him this twelve
monthe or thereabouts & have fownd him to deale well Sc verye
willing to serve your majesty. Hcrt can tell yow he was first
recommended vnto me by Christopher Blunt who never abused
[i.e. deceived] me, but continueth well affected to serve Sc honor
your majesty. And I am of opinion that you entertayne the sayd
Poley who by Bluntes labours Sc my advise is placed with the Ladye
Sydney, the dowghter of Secrctarye Walsingham, Sc by that means
ordinarilyc in his Howse and therebye able to picke owt many
things to the information of your majesty. ... As I have sayd,
[Poley] is in a place to discover many thinges which he beginneth
to doe to the disadvantage of the common enemies.’

Morgan goes on to tell Mary that ‘eyther Rawley, the
mignon of her of England is wearye of her or els she is

4427

122 ROBERT POLEY

wearye of him, for I heare she hath now entertayned one
[Charles] Blunt, brother of the Lord Mount] oye, a yong
gentilman, whose grandmother she may be for her age
and his’. It is therefore expedient that Mary should make
Poley understand that she thinks well of this gentleman’s
brother, Christopher, ‘who is at present in Holland with
Leicester, & has sent for Poley to come to him’.

There is no evidence as to whether or not Poley obeyed
this summons. But on lo April, Charles Paget wrote, as
Morgan had done ten days before, emphasizing the ad-
vantage to Mary’s cause of Poley’s position in Sidney’s
service.

‘There be two other which be in practyse to gayne others to
serve your majesty for intelligence, whereof one is called Poley,
a great friend to Christopher Blunt, of whome I suppose your
majesty hath harde here tofore. Morgan and I have had con-
ference with the sayd Poley and hope he is in soch place, being
servant to Sir Phillipp Sydney, and thereby remayneth with his
Ladyc and in house with Secrctarye Walsingham, so as he shalbe
able to give your majesty advertisement from time to time.’

As Sir Philip had left England on i6 November 1585,
to take up his post as Governor of Flushing, and as he
remained in the Netherlands till his death on 17 October
1586, Poley can have had little personal intercourse with
him. But as both Morgan and Paget state, he remained
with Lady Sidney, who followed her husband about the
end of March. Poley, as his own words will show, while
acting as an agent for Sir Francis, was brought into direct
association with Thomas Walsingham, son of a cousin of
Sir Francis, who thus appears as a link between Marlowe
and Poley as well as between Marlowe and Thomas
Watson. It may well have been at his Chislehurst home,
or at one of the two residences of ‘Mr. Secretary’, in
London or at Barn Elms, that Marlowe and Poley first met.

An episode in Mr. Secretary’s presence, which if William
Yeomans’s memory on 7 January 1589 is to be trusted,
took place early in 1586, throws a remarkable light on
Poley’s mentality. ‘About three years past’, according

PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT 123

to Yeomans, Poley was examined before Sir Francis
Walsingham ‘by the space of two hours touching a book
which was made against the Earl of Leicester’. This was
evidently the notorious Leicester'^s Commonwealth, pub-
lished in 1584, and prohibited by the Privy Council on
28 June 1585.

‘Although Mr. Secretary did vse him very cruelly yet
woulde he never confes ytt. And he saied that he putt
Mr. Secretary into that heate that he looked out of his
wyndowe and grynned like a dogge.’ Yeomans asked
Poley how he ‘durst to denye the having of the said booke
because he verie well knewe that he had the same’.*
‘Marye’, answered Poley, ‘it is noe matter for I will sweare
and forsweare my selffc rather then I will accuse my sellTe
to doe me any harm.’ What an avowal from one of the
trio on whose evidence the Coroner’s jury were to be
dependent later for their verdict on how Marlowe met
his death!

During the summer of 1586 Poley was becoming more
and more deeply involved in plots and counterplots. He
wrote an unsigned letter of thanks to Mary, Queen of
Scots, which evidently caused her some perplexity. She
refers on July 27 to ‘a letter of Poleyes as I judge by
reason of some reward he thanketh me for therein receaved
beyond sea. Otherwise the letter being an unknowne hand
without subscription or name therein I am not assured
from whence it came. Neyther can I tell by whome to
send back my answer agayne.’

Mary had far deeper reason for being distrustful of

^ One reason for Poley having a copy of Leicester's Commonwealth h
that he is probably the ‘Master Pooley’ mentioned on p. 86 (edition of
1641). Lord North was one of those present at the marriage of Leicester
to Lettice, Countess of Essex, on 21 Sept. 1578, and received in consequence
a letter of sharp rebuke from the Queen. According to the writer of
Leicester's Commonwealth he told ‘his trusty Pooly’, who repeated the words
to Sir Robert Jermine, that ‘he was resolved to sinke or swimme with my
Lord of Leicester’. If Poley was in the service of Lord North as early as
1578, this would be a sidelight on his career about five years previous to
any documentary information.

124 ROBERT POLEY

Poley than she knew. For by July 1586 he had already
wormed his way into the secrets of the hot-headed youth,
rich and well born, who staked everything for her sake
and in losing brought doom upon her as well as himself.
Into the well-known story of the conspiracy of Anthony
Babington it is not necessary to go here. It is sufficient
to say that about April 1586 Babington, largely inspired
by John Ballard, a priest from Rheims, formed a plot that
included the murder of Elizabeth; that in July he com-
municated the scheme to Mary; that Ballard was seized
early in August; that Babington afterwards fled but was
discovered; and that he and Ballard were executed on
20 September. The plot, though completely mis-
managed, is of first-rate historical importance because it
led directly to Mary’s own trial and execution.

Polcy’s relation to the conspiracy is curiously equivocal.
He appears to have been an agent of Walsingham, but he
won Babington’s complete confidence, and after the arrest
of the conspirators he was committed to the Tower, where
he was examined on various charges and made a lengthy
confession. From this we learn that he was introduced
to Babington in the middle of June, that he might pro-
cure him a licence from Walsingham for some years of
continental travel:

‘I labored . . . that I might accompanye him betwene the
condicyon of a servaunte & companion beinge vtterly vnhable to
maintaine myselfe in all this jorncye, thinkinge with myselfe that
I should bothc better my selfe thereby bothe in language and ex-
perience and allso do the State much better servyze in that coursse
abroade then in that wherein I remained att hoame . . . Babington
agreed to supplie all my charges of travell, and to give me some
yeerly stipende att my retorne . . . and I tellinge him that I re-
mained bownd with 2 sureties with me to appear every 20 dayes att
the Court, he offered me ^^40 or ^^50 to make means for my dis-
charge, which money I receyved of him afterwards to that ende
the daye before my Lady Sidnies going hence towards Flushinge.’i

* The dates are difficult to reconcile, for Lady Sidney had gone to
Flushing before the middle of June, when, according to Poley, he first met
Babington.

PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT 125

Here incidentally we get an important sidelight on
Foley’s dubious activities. How was it that he, while in the
service of the Sidneys, and in touch with Walsingham, ‘re-
mained bownd with two sureties to appear every 20 dayes
at the Court’, and had to buy his discharge through a gift
from Babington ? Was it a sequel to his examination con-
cerning Leicester's Commonwealth ?

Foley procured Babington a couple of interviews with
Walsingham, who evidently encouraged further confi-
dences by speaking favourably of the go-between. On
Babington’s asking by what means Foley’s credit grew
with Mr. Secretary,

‘I towlde him by dealingc with his honor in some biisines of
my master, Sir Philipp Sidney, but he seeminge to discrediie that
& urge me further, I towld him further I was in a like coursse of
doinge servize to the state as him self had nowc vndertaken. He
answered mee that was impossible, because he knew thait all the
menn of note in England being Catholikes had me in vchemenie
suspicyon.’

For some time longer Foley continued to play his double
part, while Walsingham made excuses for postponing a
further interview with Babington or the grant of his pass-
port. Then, when all was ready, the Government struck.
They just missed the chance of rounding up on 2 August
‘a whole knot’ of the conspirators at supper in Foley’s
garden, including ‘Skyrres’, who is probably Nicholas
Skeres, afterwards to be present with Foley at Marlowe’s
death. But on 4 August Ballard was arrested at Foley’s
lodging, immediately after a visit by Thomas Walsingham
‘to whom I had delivered such speeches as Mr. Secretary
had commanded me the day before’. Babington’s flight
followed, and before his arrest he wrote Foley a last letter
in which affection and doubt are pathetically mingled :

‘I am the same I allwayes pretended. I pray god yow be, and
ever so remayne towardes me. Take hede to your ownc parte
least of these my mysfortunes yow beare the blame . . . ffarcwell
sweet Robyn, if as I take the, true to me. If not adieu omnium
bipedmn nequissimus. Retorne me thync answere for my satisfaction.

126 ROBERT POLEY

& my dyamond, & what els thow wilt. The fornace is prepared
wherin our faith muste be tried, ffarewell till we mete, which god
knowes when.’

When the conspirators were arrested, Poley was com-
mitted to the Tower, where his confession was written.
On 2 July 1588 it is officially recorded that he had been
a ‘prisoner one year xi monthes’. It is difficult to reconcile
this with the evidence of the bills of the Lieutenant of
the Tower which include one for the expenses connected
with the imprisonment ofRobert Poley from 18 August 1586
to ‘the laste of September the next folowinge beinge syx
wicks’ amounting in all to vi/f xiijj.^ There is no further
similar bill relating to Poley till one from Christmas Day
1587 till 25 March 1588. There is no bill extant for the
following quarter, but from 24 June till 29 September
the Lieutenant of the Tower records the expenses in
connexion with his imprisonment as xv/z xijj. viijV. All
the bills may not have been preserved or he may have been
at liberty during intervals. But he was regarded with
suspicion by the Government, as is plain from his protests
in a petitioning letter apparently addressed to the Earl of
Leicester in which he begs the Earl to employ him in
some service at home or abroad. The letter is not dated,
but it gives some clues to the time of its composition.
It includes the phrases, ‘then went your honour imme-
diately to Kylingworth’ (Kenilworth) and ‘your honour’s
great business of Parliament’. It must therefore have been
written after 29 November 1586, when Leicester returned
from the unsuccessful campaign in Flanders, and probably
between 15 February and 23 March 1587, when a Parlia-

* Tlic details of this and the two other bills mentioned here are printed
by Miss de Kalb in The Nineteenth Century and After, Nov. 1927. They
are preserved among the bills of the Lieutenant of the Tower in the
Public Record Office, and are numbered E 407/56, Nos. 44, 47, 50.
A minor conspirator in the Babington plot, James Tipping, is also men-
tioned in the Tower bills, and like Poley had on 2 July 1588 been a prisoner
for a year and eleven months. See further Ethel Seaton, R.E.S., July 1929,
pp. 277-9.

PLOT AND COUNTERPLOT 127

ment was sitting, which the Earl regularly attended. It is
remarkable that Poley speaks of having recently intro-
duced to Christopher Blunt a Thomas Audley who had
‘married a near kinswoman of your honour’s first wife’,
and who wanted to ‘move some suit’ to the Earl. What
can Leicester have thought of such a reminder of Amy
Robsart, if the reference be really to her.? Audley had
accompanied Poley among other places to Seething Lane,
‘where I attended Mr, Thomas Walsingham for my secret
recourse to Mr. Secretary, but all to lost labour then and
my distress now’. Here again we have direct evidence of
Poley’s association with Marlowe’s patron.

His confinement in the Tower cannot have been close,
for, as before in the Marshalsca, Joan Yeomans was able
to visit him, with ‘one W. Colder’, and to bring him
letters from overseas from Christopher Blunt, who was
serving in Flanders in 1587-8. Yeomans gives a vivid
account in his evidence of how he found his wife reading
one of these letters and of her throwing it into the fire.

Ede and Yeomans both confirm the information from
the Tower bills that Poley was released about Michael-
mas 1588. This was apparently due to the intervention of
Sir Francis Walsingham. ‘Had not I good luckc to gett
owt of the Tower?’ Poley asked Yeomans, declaring that
‘Mr. Secretarie did deliver him owt’. ‘You arc greatlie
beholding vnto Mr. Secretarie’, answered Yeomans.
‘Naye’, said Poley, ‘he is more beholding vnto me then
I am vnto him for there arc further matters betwene hym
Sc me then all the world shall knowe of.’ He further
declared that Walsingham had contracted a disreputable
disease in France.

On his release Poley quartered himself on the unfortu-
nate Yeomans, who took Ede ‘into his nether room and
made very great mone that Poley was come to lodge and
did lodge in his house again’. Ede sensibly advised Yeo-
mans to get rid of him, as otherwise he would ‘beguile
him either of his wife or of his life’. And so it proved.
On 10 November Poley got Yeomans committed to the

128 ROBERT POLEY

Marshalsea for disregard of a warrant of the Vice-
Chamberlain, Sir Thomas Heneage. Richard Ede again
intervened as a peacemaker, but his efforts, though they
got Yeomans out of prison, ended in failure, for Mistress
Yeomans, on pretence that she was going to market,
finally eloped with Poley. Yet neither his private mis-
conduct nor his dubious political record prevented him
from being re-engaged before the end of the year in the
service of the Government. And, as will be seen, he was
actively employed therein on the day when Marlowe met
his doom in May 1593. But till then the dramatist was
to continue the triumphant theatrical career which had
begun with the T amburlaine plays.

THE TRAGEDY OF THE JEW OF MALTA

T hough the only extant edition of The Famous
Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta is the quarto of
1633, the date of the play can be fixed within fairly close
limits. The words in the original prologue, 1 . 3, ‘And now
the Guise is dead’, refer to the assassination of the third
Duke of Guise on 23 December 1588, and would have
particular point if the event was comparatively recent.
Henslowe in his Diary records a performance of The Jew
of Malta by Lord Strange’s men on 26 February 1 591/2,
when seven shillings was taken, and he does not mark it
as a new play. 1589 may be taken as the approximate date.

Henslowe’s Diary gives evidence of the popularity of
the play, thirty-six performances being recorded up to
21 June 1596. There was a revival of it in 1601, when
Henslowe notes: ‘Lent vnto Robert shawe & mr. Jube
the 19 of Maye 1601 to bye divers thinges for the Jewe of
malta the some of . . . v^*. lent mor to the littell tayller
the same daye for more thinges for the Jewe of malta
some of . . . x^’^ Some of the properties and costumes
evidently had to be renovated.

It is improbable that so popular a piece did not find
its way into print till forty years after Marlowe’s death.
It was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 17 May 1594
to Nicholas Linge and Thomas Millington. If they pub-
lished an edition, not a single copy has survived. Thomas
Heywood in dedicating the 1633 quarto to his worthy
friend Mr. Thomas Hammon speaks of the play as ‘being
newly brought to the Presse’. This is ambiguous, as ‘newly’
may either mean ‘for the first time’ or ‘anew’.

In his epistle to Hammon Heywood proclaims himself
the threefold sponsor of the play:

‘As I vsher’d it unto the Court, and presented it to the Cock-pit,

* Henslowe' s Diary ^ ed. Greg, i. 137.

4427 s

130 THE TRAGEDY OF

with these Prologues and Epilogues here inserted, so now being
newly brought to the Presse, I was loath it should be published
without the ornament of an Epistle.’

The further question arises: did Heywood confine him-
self to writing prologues and epilogues when The Jew of
Malta was revived first at the Court and afterwards at the
Cockpit in Whitefriars with Richard Perkins in the title-
role, and providing ‘the ornament of an Epistle’ for the
quarto published by Nicholas Vavasour ? Or did he edit
and revise the play? His own words seem to negative
this: ‘Sir, you have been pleased to grace some of mine
own works with your courteous patronage; I hope this
will not be the worse accepted because commended by
me.’ Here Heywood draws a definite contrast between
his own works and one only commended by him. In the
prologue spoken at Court he craves pardon for boldly
daring to present among plays ‘that now in fashion are . . .
this writ many years ago’. And in the prologue at the
Cockpit he declares that by Marlowe

the best of Poets in that age
The Malta Jew had being, and was made.

But with seventeenth-century standards such statements
are not entirely conclusive. The similarity, within limits,
of the episode of the two Friars in The Jew of Malta^
Act IV. ii and iii, to the underplot of Heywood’s The
Captives has naturally suggested the presence of his hand
in the 1633 version of Marlowe’s play. The scenes of
which Bellamira, the courtesan, is the centre have been
similarly suspected. The points involved are somewhat
more complicated than may appear at first sight and they
are discussed in an appendix to this chapter. In the light
of the whole evidence I agree with the latest editor of
The Jew of Malta that ‘we must . . . give a verdict of
Not proven at the very least when asked to believe these
scenes are by Heywood’.* They are not marked by his
peculiarities of diction and they are not so extraneous to

’ The Jetv of Malta, ed. H. S. Bennett, p. 9 (1931).

THE JEW OF MALTA 131

the structure of the play as might be supposed. On the
other hand, it is very unlikely that after more than forty
years the play, especially if it survived only in the play-
house in manuscript, has reached us exactly as it came
from Marlowe’s pen.

In his search for materials for Part II of Tamburlaine
Marlowe, as has been seen, made use in the earlier Acts
of Chronicorum Turcicorum tomi duo of P. Lonicerus
narrating the events which led up to the battle of Varna.
In this Chronicle he also came across an account of a
Portuguese Jew, Juan Miques or Michesius, who in the
later half of the sixteenth century became a favourite of
the Sultan Selim II, and was raised by him to a position
of great authority as Duke of Naxos. ^ In this he proved
himself a consistent opponent of the Christian powers,
and particularly urged the Sultan in 1569 to break faith
with the Republic of Venice and to seize the isle of
Cyprus. A similar account is given in another source
available to Marlowe, Belleforest’s Cosmografhie Uni-
verselle^ ii. 580, where ‘Micqu^’ is called ‘un paillard luif
. . . homme subtil, vus 6 et malicieux’. This is amplified
in a later section of the same work (ii. 785), which also
tells of his widely dispersed financial interests, ‘car il auoit
demeure un long temps a Lyon negotiant en France, puis
a Marseille, de la passa a Rome, visita la Sicile, et puis
prit son adresse a Venise’. Recent research has made it
increasingly evident that Marlowe found the chief
materials for his plays in books that he had read. J. Kell-
ner was therefore probably right when he suggested half
a century ago^ that Miques was the prototype of Barabas,
though he was unaware that Marlowe had the opportunity
of making his acquaintance in the pages of Lonicerus and
Belleforest.

^ See ‘Fresh Sources for Marlowe’, by Ethel Seaton. Miss Seaton quotes
the account of Miques in Lonicerus, op. cit., 2nd edit., I584> h. 5. She
also gives in full the passages concerning ‘Micque’ in Belleforest s Cosmo-
graphie Universelle.

^ In Englische StudieUy x. 8o ff. (1887).

132 THE TRAGEDY OF

But in Part II of Tamburlaine the dramatist had already
shown that he could unify materials drawn from different
sources, and he probably did not draw his Jew from a single
model. He may well, as Tucker Brooke has suggested,^
have borrowed features from the personality of another
Jew of Constantinople, David Passi, ‘whose career reached
its culmination after half-a-dozen years of European
notoriety in March 1591’. Passi was involved in the
Turkish designs against Malta, but he ‘pursued a boggling
policy, playing off Turk against Christian after the
fashion of Marlowe’s Barabas. He was closely connected
with English diplomacy in the Mediterranean’. An
opponent of Passi at the Turkish court was another Jew,
Alvaro Mendez, who was a kinsman of Miques, and
brother-in-law of Dr. Roderigo Lopez. In the eighteen
months preceding Marlowe’s death he twice sent Jews
of his household to England on pro-Turkish missions.^ It
was open to the dramatist to supplement his book-
knowledge of Ottoman affairs by conversations at first
hand.

Whatever were the exact sources of his information
it was an easy transition for a playwright to pass from the
feuds and treacheries of Scythians, Turks, and Christians
in the Orient to those of Jews, Turks, and Christians in
the Mediterranean. The third of the great religious sys-
tems known to Marlowe was now to suffer at his hands the
same mockery as its rivals. The choice of the name Bara-
bas, with its sinister associations, for the Jew of Malta
was in itself significant. Yet Barabas, as first conceived
by Marlowe, was more than a representative of the
Hebrew race and religion. Within the narrower sphere of
finance he is cast in the same mould as Tamburlaine. We
see him on his chosen field of battle, with his munitions
of war, when in the opening scene of the play he ‘is
discovered in his counting-house with heaps of gold before
him’. He turns contemptuously from the ‘paltry silver-

^ In T.L.S.j 8 June 1922.

^ ‘Fresh Sources for Marlowe’, p. 392.

133

THE JEW OF MALTA

lings’ pursed from his humbler clients, and finds his com-
peers in those who traffic in the virgin treasures of the
Orient (i. i. 19-24):

Give me the merchants of the Indian mines
That trade in metal of the purest mould;

The wealthy Moor, that in the eastern rocks
Without control can pick his riches up,

And in his house heap pearl like pibble-stoncs,

Receive them free and sell them by the weight.

Of like quality is his own treasure in precious stones,

Bags of fiery opals, sapphires, amethysts,

Jacinths, hard topaz, grass-green emeralds.

Beauteous rubies, sparkling diamonds.

He gloats over the names of each of the costly ‘seld-seen’
heaps as Tamburlaine over the titles of each conquered
province; and as the Scythian seeks a world-wide empery
so Barabas covets

Infinite riches in a little room. • ^ ’

Like a general reviewing his forces he keeps track of
the movements of his merchant fleet (i. i. 41-7):

I hope my ships

I sent for Egypt and the bordering isles
Are gotten up by Nilus’ winding banks :

Mine argosy from Alexandria,

Loaden with spice and silks now under sail.

Are smoothly gliding down by Candy-shore
To Malta, through our Mediterranean sea.

When a shipmaster in his employment enters with the
news that his ships are safely riding fin Malta road’ and
asks him to come there to pay the ‘custom’ duties, Barabas
answers him in the imperious tone of a master of men,
whose word is law in his own sphere (i. i. 55“^)’

go bid them come ashore
And bring with them their bills of entry :

I hope our credit in the custom-house
Will serve as well as I were present there.

134 the tragedy OF

When the shipmaster demurs because the duties come to
so immense a sum, the Jew cuts him short,

I Go tell ’em the Jew of Malta sent thee, man:

Tush, who amongst ’em knows not Barabas?

and there comes the instant response, ‘I go’. In the same
tone of authority, when a second shipmaster announces
the arrival of his richly laden argosy from Alexandria,
Barabas cries:

Well, go

And bid the merchants and my men despatch
And come ashore, and see the fraught discharg’d,

and again the answer comes at once, T go’. Even the
elements are yoked to do him service and to fulfil Old
Testament prophecy (i. i. 101-9):

Thus trowls our fortune in by land and sea,

And thus are we on every side enrich’d:

These are the blessings promis’d to the Jews,

And herein was old Abram’s happiness:

What more may heaven do for earthly man
Than thus to pour out plenty in their laps.

Ripping the bowels of the earth for them.

Making the seas their servants, and the winds
To drive their substance with successful blasts?

Barabas, like Tamburlaine, is greedy of sovereignty, but
for him it lies not in kingship but in riches —
who is honour’d now but for his wealth?

He rolls off the names of Jewish millionaires in many
lands (i. i. 125-31) :

wealthy every one,

Ay, wealthier far than any Christian.

I must confess we come not to be kings :

That ’s not our fault : alas, our number ’s few.

And crowns come either by succession
Or urg’d by force: and nothing violent,

Oft have I heard tell, can be permanent.

Again Marlowe shows his skill in dovetailing materials
drawn from very diverse sources. Barabas, who had been

THE JEW OF MALTA 135

quoting Scripture at the beginning of his monologue, is
echoing in the three last lines a typical passage in Chapter
II of Machiavelli’s The Prince.^ And in the first words of
another Jew, who now enters with two compatriots,

Tush, tell not me; ’twas done of policy,

we hear the keynote of the Machiavellian doctrine as
popularly interpreted in England, especially by readers of
Gentillet’s French counterblast to it in his Discours sur
les moyens de bien gouverner. . . . Contre N, Machiavel,
published in 1576.

The central problem of Marlowe’s work and career lies
in his exceptional union of two almost conflicting Renais-
sance elements. There was in him the soaring aspiration
after power and knowledge and beauty in their ideal and
absolute forms. Side by side with this there was the
critical, analytic impulse which led to the questioning of
orthodox creeds and standards of conduct. As the myths
of classical antiquity had fed his ‘aspiring mind’, so his
critical faculty, sharpened by his governmental service,
was fortified further by the study of the maxims of
sixteenth-century Italian statecraft, considered without
relation to the special conditions in which they originated.
Thus the Machiavelli who speaks the Prologue to the
Jew of Malta is to Marlowe one and the same, whether
alive in his native land, or embodied in France in the
Guise, or after his death come to frolic with his friends
in England ( 11 . 9-15):

Admir’d I am of those that hate me most:

Though some speak openly against my books,

Yet will they read me, and thereby attain
To Peter’s chair; and when they cast me off.

Are poison’d by my climbing followers.

I count religion but a childish toy,

And hold there is no sin but ignorance.

The two last lines misrepresent Machiavelli, but they

* See the note on p. 44 of H. S. Bennett’s edition of the play.

THE TRAGEDY OF

136

could be made use of by the enemies of the ‘atheist’ Mar-
lowe. There is a closer approach to the Florentine’s
doctrine in what follows :

Many will talk of title to a crown :

What right had Caesar to the empery ?

Might first made kings and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco’s, they were writ in blood.

Hence comes it that a strong-built citadel
Commands much more than letters can import.

It is in this spirit of what is now known as Realpolitik
that the action of the play develops. Barabas’s com-
patriots have hastened to consult him in an emergency,
‘for he can counsel best in these affairs’. They bring the
startling news that a Turkish fleet has arrived, that the
Maltese authorities are entertaining the newcomers in
the Senate house, and that all the Jews in Malta have been
summoned there. After discussing the situation they take
their leave, and Barabas dismisses them contemptuously
(i. i. 177-83);

These silly men mistake the matter clean.

Long to the Turk did Malta contribute;

Which tribute all in policy, I fear,

The Turks have let increase to such a sum
As all the wealth of Malta cannot pay;

And now by that advantage thinks, belike.

To seize upon the town; ay, that he seeks.

But Barabas can counter State ‘policy’ with the older
doctrine of individual self-preservation, and Terence can
be quoted (not quite correctly) against Machiavelli:

Ego mihimet sum semper proximus.*

Things, however, do not go according to his plan. The
Turks in i. ii grant the knights of Malta a month’s respite
for the collection of the arrears of tribute, and the

* Andria, iv. i. 12, ‘Proximus sum egomet mihi.’ Marlowe seems to
have adapted the words to fill a five-foot line. This is his only quotation
from a classical comic dramatist.

THE JEW OF MALTA 137

Governor passes on the levy to the Jews with the unctuous
justification (i. ii. 63-5):

through our sufferance of your hateful lives,

Who stand accursed in the sight of heaven,

These taxes and afflictions are befalPn.

Each Jew is to pay one-half of his estate, or else to become
at once a Christian; if he refuses he is to lose all he has.
The other Jews immediately promise to give half, but
Barabas shows his masterful spirit when he declares ‘I will
be no convertite^ and to the demand, ‘then pay thy half’,
proudly retorts (i. ii. 86-8):

Half of my substance is a city’s wealth.

Governor, it was not got so easily;

Nor will I part so slightly therewithal.

But at the threat to seize all his wealth he abruptly
r ecants .

Corpo di Dio! Stay: you shall have half;

Let me be us’d but as my brethren are.

When this is denied him he asks in bitter irony.

Will you then steal my goods ?

Is theft the ground of your religion

To which the Governor replies with the plea of Caiaphas:

No, Jew; we take particularly thine,

To save the ruin of a multitude :

And better one want for a common good.

Than many perish for a private man.

This he follows with the self-righteous excuse (i. ii.

108-10):

If your first curse fall heavy on thy head.

And make thee poor and scornM of all the world,

’Tis not our fault, but thy inherent sin.

The indignant retort leaps from the Jew’s lips:

What, bring you Scripture to confirm your wrongs }
Preach me not out of my possessions.

* I see no reason for A. M. Clark’s assumption {Thomas Heywood^
p. 290) that there has been a cut here, and that ‘a rebellious speech by
Barabas at the very least must have been omitted’.

4427

138 THE TRAGEDY OF

He claims that the individual must be judged according
to his actions, that ^the man that dealeth righteously
shall live’, but he speaks to deaf ears. The Governor
plumes himself upon sparing the Jew^’s life:

to stain our hands with blood
Is far from us and our profession —

provoking the damning reply,

Why, I esteem the injury far less,

To take the lives of miserable men
Than be the causers of their misery.

After the swift thrust and parry of this dialogue, with
its Scriptural basis, it is an unexpected transition to Mar-
lowe’s metaphysical terminology when, after the exit of
the Maltese, Barabas appeals to the ‘great Primus MotoP
to deliver their souls to everlasting pains. When one of
his countrymen exhorts him to patience and bids him
remember Job, he bursts out angrily, ‘What tell you me
of Job V — whose wealth could not compare with his. And
he appropriates to himself the words in which the
patriarch pours forth his lamentations (i. ii. 197-9):

For only I have toil’d to inherit here
The months of vanity, and loss of time,

And painful nights, have bin appointed me.*

But it is in the loftier spirit of a defeated commander
that he takes leave of his compatriots :

give him liberty at least to mourn.

That in a field, amidst his enemies.

Doth see his soldiers slain, himself disarm’d.

And knows no means of his recovery.

When their backs are turned, however, he again pours
contempt on them as ‘slaves’ and witless ‘villains’ who
mistake him for ‘a senseless lump of clay’. He knows
himself to be ‘fram’d of finer mould than common men’,
with the future open to him to retrieve his fortunes.

* H. S. Bennett in his edition of the play, p. 58, note, quotes Job vii. 3 :
‘So am I made to possess months of vanity, and wearisome nights are
appointed to me.’

THE JEW OF MALTA 139

Herein he finds a helpmeet in his daughter Abigail.
She appears to be an invention of the dramatist. As
classical allusions are relatively fewer in The Jezv of Malta
than in Marlowe’s other plays it is notable that when
Barabas first mentions Abigail he speaks of her (i. i.
135-6) as

one sole daughter whom I hold as dear
As Agamemnon did his Iphigen.

Agamemnon’s readiness to sacrifice his daughter for the
welfare of the Greek host may have suggested to Marlowe
the idea of a daughter whom Barabas would be willing
to sacrifice on his own behalf. Agamemnon might well
have used to Iphigeneia at Aulis the words of Barabas to
Abigail (i. ii. 271-2):

Be rul’d by me, for in extremity
We ought to make bar of no policy.

Against the evil day that has befallen he had hidden
under a plank in the upper chamber of his house

Ten thousand portagues,* besides great pearls,

Rich costly jewels and stones infinite.

As the Governor has now turned the house into a convent
he instructs Abigail to gain admission to it by applying
to become a novice under the pretence that she wishes
to make atonement for sin and want of faith. He has
told her that he will be at the door at dawn, but, sleepless
with excitement, he arrives with a light before midnight
at the moment when Abigail has risen to search for, and
find, the hidden treasure. As it is before the appointed
time each is uncertain of the other’s presence (ii. i. 41-4):

Bar. But stay: what star shines yonder in the east.^

The loadstar of my life, if Abigail.

Who ’s there

A big. Who ’s that ?

Bar. Peace, Abigail! ’tis I.

Abig. Then, father, here receive thy happiness.

^ Portuguese gold coins of high value.

140 THE TRAGEDY OF

As the bags containing the treasure come tumbling
from above into his arms, Barabas breaks into tumultuous
ecstasy;

O my girl,

My gold, my fortune, my felicity;

O girl! O gold! O beauty! O my bliss!

And as, in the original stage-direction, he ‘hugs his
bags’ he chants over them a paean of loverlike rapture
(ii. ii. 60-3):

Now Phoebus, ope the eyelids of the day,

And for the raven, wake the morning lark,

That I may hover with her in the air;

Singing o’er these, as she does o’er her young.

Up to this point the action of the play has been in the
main closely knit and convincing. But even with the
recovery of his hidden store it strains our belief to find
Barabas in ii. iii become again as wealthy as before, with
a new house ‘as great and fair as is the Governor’s’.
Abigail, released from the convent, is again with him, and
is now to play a different part in his schemes. It has
already been noted as a feature of Marlowe’s dramatic
technique that he provides every prominent woman in
his plays with rival lovers.^ In ^he Jew of Malta Abigail
is first beloved of Don Mathias, who describes her to
Lodowick, the Governor’s son, as (i. ii. 378-9)

A fair young maid, scarce fourteen years of age,

The sweetest flower in Cytherca’s field.

Lodowick determines to see her beauty for himself, and
is hypocritically greeted by Barabas, who is yearning for
revenge on the Governor. Though restored to wealth,
the iron has entered into his soul, and there is a new note
of coarse-grained venom in his outburst against the
‘swine-eating Christians’ (ii, iii. 23-9):

I learned in Florence how to kiss my hand.

Heave up my shoulders when they call me dog.

And duck as low as any bare-foot friar;

* See above, pp. 54-5.

THE JEW OF MALTA 141

Hoping to see them starve upon a stall,

Or else be gather’d for in our synagogue,

That, when the oflFering-basin comes to me,

Even for charity I may spit into ’t.

With equivocal phrases of w^elcome, and muttered
threatening ‘asides’, Barabas guides Lodowick to his house,
where he bids Abigail feign love for him and plight him
her troth, though at the same time he assures Don
Mathias that the girl shall be his and stirs him to angry
jealousy. When Abigail protests that Mathias and not
Lodowick is her lover Barabas applies, mutatis mutandis^
the argument that Baldwin of Bohemia had used in
Part II of amburlainey ii. i, for breaking faith with the
Turks^ (ii. iii. 310-13):

It ’s no sin to deceive a Christian;

For they themselves hold it a principle,

Faith is not to be held with heretics:

But all are heretics that are not Jews.

When the rival lovers, though friends from youth,
have thus been manoeuvred into enmity, Barabas brings
his plot to a head by forging a challenge from Lodowick
and sending it to Mathias. In the duel that follows
(ill. ii) they are both slain, to the horrified amazement of
their relatives, who, with incredible na'ivete\ do not scent
the Jew’s hand in the fatality. It is Abigail only who de-
nounces his ruthless and tortuous ‘policy’ (iii. iii. 43-5 1) :
Admit thou lov’dst not Lodowick for his sire,

Yet Don Mathias ne’er offended thee:

But thou wert set upon extreme revenge,

Because the Governor dispossess’d thee once,

And couldst not venge it, but upon his son;

Nor on his son, but by Mathias’ means;

Nor on Mathias, but by murdering me.

But I perceive there is no love on earth.

Pity in Jews, nor piety in Turks.

The feigned challenge had been carried to Mathias by
Ithamore, a Turk captured in a sea-fight by Spaniards,

* See above, p. 89.

THE TRAGEDY OF

142

and bought by Barabas in the Maltese slave-market. With
the entry of Ithamore there is a subtle change in the atmo-
sphere of the play. Hitherto the Jew, with his imaginative
idolatry of riches, his racial and religious fanaticism, his
passion for revenge, and his ^policy’, has been a figure
of wellnigh tragic stature. Even his earliest instruc-
tions to Ithamore are in a typically Machiavellian strain
(ii. iii. 170-3):

First, be thou void of these affections,

Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear.

Be mov’d at nothing, see thou pity none.

But to thyself smile when the Christians moan.

In the Turk’s retort, ‘O brave, master! I worship your
nose for this’, there is the first allusion in the dialogue to
the Jew’s grotesque facial make-up. As if in response to
the consequent lowering of tone Barabas proceeds to give
a detailed, hair-raising recital of the villainies that he has
practised as murder, poisoner, and usurer, to which
Ithamore replies in similar vein. So crudely naive is the
Jew’s self-exposure that a modern critic, himself a
dramatist, takes the view that Barabas as here presented
is meant to be a ‘prodigious caricature’.^ I agree with
the latest editor of the play in rejecting such an interpreta-
tion, which ‘seems to postulate considerable powers of
detachment from contemporary taste and practice on the
part of Marlowe’.^ But henceforward the figure of the
Jew degenerates and he again is drawn in his derisory
aspect when Ithamore exclaims to Abigail (iii. iii. 9-1 1):
‘O mistress! I have the bravest, gravest, secret, subtle,
bottle-nosed knave to my master that ever gentleman had.’

After the revelation of her father’s villainous plot
Abigail again enters the convent not now to serve him
but to escape from him. And the earlier iniquities of
Barabas are eclipsed when through a poisoned pot of
porridge, in the guise of a present on Saint Jacques’ Even,
he does not only his daughter but all the nuns to death.

* T. S. Eliot in The Sacred Wood, p. 84.

2 The Jew of Malta, ed. H. S. Bennett, p. 17.

THE JEW OF MALTA 143

Abigail, however, has had time, in iii. vi, to disclose her
father’s practice against her lovers to Friar Bernardine,
who without directly violating the seal of confession warns
Barabas that he knows of his guilt (iv. i. 44-8). In terror
he offers to be baptized and to bestow his wealth on some
religious house. For a moment in describing his treasure
his accents catch again something of the rich glow of the
opening scene (iv. i. 66-70):

Cellars of wine, and sollars full of wheat,

Warehouses stuff’d with spices and with drugs,

Whole chests of gold, in bullion, and in coin.

Besides I know not how much weight in pearl,

Orient and round have I within my house.

It is characteristic of Marlowe to make PTiar Bernardine
contend as to who shall convert Barabas with Jacomo,
a friar of another order, who had admitted Abigail to the
sisterhood. The Jew plays off one against the other, as
he had done with the two lovers, and seeks to make him-
self safe by getting rid of both (iv. ii. 120-4) :

Now I have such a plot for both their lives.

As never Jew nor Christian knew the like:

One turn’d my daughter, therefore he shall die;

The other knows enough to have my life.

Barabas, however, makes a false boast when he claims
that his plot is entirely novel. Its most remarkable
features had been anticipated at least as early as 1476 in
a story by Masuccio di Salerno.^ Having strangled
Bernardine, with Ithamore’s aid, at midnight under his
roof, he lets him be propped up outside, leaning on his
staff, as if alive. Jacomo then arrives eager to convert the
Jew and secure his gold for his order. Finding Bernardine
blocking his way, he strikes him down with the staff, and
confesses to Barabas and Ithamore who rush out that he

* On the relation of Masuccio’s novella and the English jest-book story
of ‘Dane Hew, Munk of Leicester’ to 7 he Jew of Malta and Hey wood’s
The Captives respectively, see Appendix to this chapter.

144 the tragedy OF

has killed him. When the friar begs to be let go, the Jew
primly refuses (iv. iii. 24 ff.) :

No, pardon me; the law must have his course

To-morrow is the Sessions, you shall to it.

And is there a reminiscence of Marlowe’s own appear-
ance at the Newgate Sessions in December 1589 in
Barabas’ order ? —

Take in the staff too, for that must be shown:

Law wills that each particular be known.

Less fortunate, however, than Marlowe in 1589 Jacomo
pays the penalty for his imagined crime, with Ithamore
accompanying him at the gallows-foot and ironically
describing his last moments (iv. iv. 25-9):

‘I never knew a man take his death so patiently as this friar; he
was ready to leap off ere the halter was about his neck; and when
the hangman had put on his hempen tippet, he made such haste
to his prayers, as if he had had another cure to serve.’

So the Turk soliloquizes on his way to the house of the
courtesan, Bellamira, whose attendant ‘bully’, Pilia-
Borza, has brought him a letter of invitation from her.
The bully must have had an extravagantly hirsute make-
up, for Ithamore speaks of him as ‘a fellow . . . with a
muschatoes like a raven’s wing’, and Barabas amplifies this
(iv. V. 7-9);

a shaggy, totter’d, staring slave.

That when he speaks, draws out his grisly beard.

And winds it twice or thrice about his ear.

Whether Marlowe or another wrote the scenes, mainly
in prose, in which Bellamira and Pilia-Borza appear, they
are inferior in quality to what has gone before. Yet they
cannot be dismissed as merely irrelevant. They serve to
reveal the crimes of Barabas who had fancied himself
safe when Abigail and Bernardine were put out of the
way. Ithamore, to obtain the favours of the courtesan,
blackmails his master into sending him three hundred,
and then five hundred, crowns. After a drinking-bout

THE JEW OF MALTA 145

with Bellamira and her bully he discloses the full tale of
his own and the Jew’s villainies (iv. vi. 17-21). Barabas
counters his servant’s treachery by visiting the two in the
disguise of a French musician, with a posy of poisoned
flowers in his hat whose smell will kill them all. But before
it completes its deadly work, Bellamira and Pilia-Borza
have time (v. i. ii ff.) to tell the Governor of the Jew’s
misdeeds, in which Ithamore confesses his share. When
soon afterwards the death of the poisoned trio is an-
nounced, the body of Barabas, who has simulated his own
death by drinking poppy and mandrake juice, is borne in
and thrown over the city walls to be a prey to birds and
beasts.

Thenceforward the play, though it does not recapture
the glow and colour of the early scenes, becomes once
more an arresting exposition of Machiavellian plot and
counterplot. When Selim Calymath returns, after the
month’s respite stipulated in i. ii, to collect the Maltese
tribute to the Turks, the Governor, persuaded by the
Spanish Vice-Admiral, has closed the gates and broken
his pledge. Barabas is opportunely at hand, outside the
walls, to guide a company of Turks through a secret
passage into the town, and then to admit their main body.
For his services Calymath appoints him Governor, and
thus he has Fernese as much in his power as Tambur-
laine had Bajazeth. But even in his dizzying elevation
Barabas does not forget the maxims of The Prince, He
knows that the Maltese hate him and that he must find
means to make his place secure (v. ii. 34-7) :

No, Barabas, this must be look’d into;

And, since by wrong thou gott’st authority,

Maintain it bravely by firm policy;

At least, unprofitably lose it not.

Therefore instead of taking Fernese’s life he promises
on receipt of great sums of money to deliver Malta from
the Turks, and by a stratagem to destroy Calymath and
his men. To the new Governor’s invitation to a banquet
4427

146 THE TRAGEDY OF

before he sets sail the Turkish prince answers with royal
magnanimity (v. iii. 21-5):

I fear me, messenger, to feast my train
Within a town of war so lately pillag’d
Will be too costly and too troublesome:

Yet would I gladly visit Barabas,

For well has Barabas deserv’d of us.

There is a flash of the Jew’s old grandiloquence in the
retort through his messenger’s lips :

thus saith the Governor
That he hath in his store a pearl so big,

So precious, and withal so orient,

As, be it valu’d but indifferently.

The price thereof will serve to entertain
Selim and all his soldiers for a month.

The Turkish prince, with his bassoes, is to be feasted
in the citadel, and his soldiers in the more spacious
quarters of a monastery, which stands as an outhouse to
the town. When Fernese returns with a hundred thousand
pounds collected from the citizens Barabas discloses his
policy (v. V. 24 ff.). The monastery has been mined
underneath, with explosives ready to be discharged, and
in the citadel Barabas himself has been very busy with
a hammer helping to make

a dainty gallery

The floor whereof, this cable being cut.

Doth fall asunder, so that it doth sink
Into a deep pit past recovery.

At the sound of a warning-piece the monastery is to
be fired and Fernese is to cut the cord that will send
Calymath to his doom. But Fernese double-crosses
Barabas. He has the charge sounded and cuts the cable
at the moment when the Jew is on the gallery floor
waiting to welcome the guests. Thereupon, as the
original stage-direction has it, there is ‘a cauldron dis-
covered’, the ‘j cauderon for the Jewe’ which is listed
among the properties of the Lord Admiral’s company in

THE JEW OF MALTA 147

March 1598A After fruitless cries for help to the Christian
onlookers Barabas, resuming at the last something of his
first dignity, determines to die with ‘resolution’, and
boasts of his misdeeds (v. v. 81-6):

Know, Governor, ’twas I that slew thy son,

I fram’d the challenge that did make them meet;

Know, Calymath, 1 aim’d thy overthrow:

And, had I but escap’d this stratagem,

I would have brought confusion on you all,

Damn’d Christians, dogs, and Turkish infidels!

But his intolerable pangs from the heated cauldron cut
short his speech and force him to a last, long-drawn,
agonized cry:

Die, life! fly, soul! tongue, curse thy fill and die!

Yet the work of Barabas in an unforeseen sense lives
after him. Though the Turkish prince has been saved his
soldiers in the monastery have been massacred by the
explosion, and Calymath is thus in effect a prisoner in the
hands of the Maltese. It is, as Fernese caustically terms it,

a Jew’s courtesy.

For he that did by treason work our fall.

By treason hath deliver’d thee to us.

And his final warning to the Turkish prince anticipates
in its ring the words of Faulconbridge at the close of
Shakespeare’s King John :

for come all the world
To rescue thee, so will we guard us now.

As sooner shall they drink the ocean dry.

Than conquer Malta, or endanger us.

Though spoken by a Maltese Governor they sound like
England’s defiant challenge from her sea-girt shores to
all enemies in the immediate post-Armada years.

* Henslowe Papers, ed. W. W. Greg, p. Ii8. I think that Bakeless is
mistaken in saying (op. cit., pp. 38-9) that Barabas ‘was boiled to death
in a cauldron exactly like the unfortunate Friar Stone of Canterbury’.
His extracts from the city accounts, I539~95> seem to show that the friar
was hanged and that the kettle in wliich he was ‘parboiled’ was used for
one of the grim sequels to a Tudor execution for treason.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IX

Thomas Hey wood and ^The Jew of Malta^

The view held by F. G. Fleay* that Heywood interpolated scenes
into the 1633 text of The Jew of Malta has been set forth more
precisely and exhaustively by Arthur Melville Clark in Appendix III
to his volume Thomas Heywood: Playwright and Miscellanist (1931).
One preliminary assumption of Fleay and Clark may be dismissed
at the outset. The last line of the Epilogue spoken at Court,

We only act and speak what others write
they interpret as implying that there was more than one author of
the play. But the words arc merely a general allusion to the
relations between actors and dramatists.

But there is an undeniable similarity up to a point between
Act IV, scenes ii and iii, and the underplot of Heywood’s Captives
(1624). It is clear that Heywood took this underplot from a
novella by Masuccio di Salerno, printed in 1476. A friar, Maestro
Diego, falls in love with a beautiful lady, wife of Messer Roderico,
who entraps and strangles him, with the aid of his servant. The
servant conveys the corpse on his back to the convent and there
props it up. It is found by another friar, an enemy of Diego, who
thinking him to be alive throws a stone at him, and when he falls,
believes that he has murdered him. He then carries the body to
the door of Roderico, who again helped by his servant sets the
murdered Diego upon a stallion, and places a lance in his hands.
Meanwhile the second friar, to escape the consequences of his
supposed guilt, rides forth on a mare which is chased by the
stallion till the friar in terror announces that he has killed Diego
and is handed over to justice. Thereupon to save him Roderico
confesses that he is the murderer and is pardoned by the king.

With changes of names and of other details not of the first impor-
tance Heywood skilfully introduces the whole of this complicated
story into The Captives ^

In The Jew of Malta Barabas lures the friar Bernardine to his

* Biographical Chronicle of the English Drama, i. 298 and ii. 61-2
(1891). A. H. Bullen in his edition oiMarlowe's Works, i. xl (1885), thought
that ‘another hand’ filled in the details of Acts III-V. Tucker Brooke,
op. cit. (p. 232), thinks it ‘not improbable’ that Heywood altered the play,
but suspends judgement.

^ See The Captives, ed. by A. C. Judson, pp. 17-24 (1921).

THE JEW OF MALTA: APPENDIX 149

house and strangles him, with Ithamore’s help, because through
Abigail’s confession he knows that her father had forged the
challenge which caused the fatal duel between Lodowick and
Mathias. At Ithamore’s suggestion the body is propped upon a
staff, and is encountered by Jacomo, a friar of a rival order, who
strikes him down, and believing that he has killed him confesses
his guilt to Barabas and Ithamore when they come forth. 'Phe
points of contact with ^he Captives are obvious. But it is necessary
to emphasize that there are also striking divergences. In The Jew
of Malta there is no mention of the triangle of husband, wife, and
amorous friar. The whole episode of the stallion and the marc is
omitted. Instead of being saved through a confession by the real
murderers, Jacomo pays the death penalty, and the opening part
of Act IV. iii, where Ithamore is encountered by Pilia-Borza and
describes the execution, contains what seem to me to be touches of
Marlowe’s ‘higlibrow’ humour (e.g. 11 . 14-15 ‘driven to a nonplus’ ;
1 . 21 Hodie till, eras mihi; 1 . 22 ‘the exercise’ used for ‘the execu-
tion’). On the other hand, as Margarete Thimmc has showm in an
exhaustive analysis,^ neither here nor elsewdiere in the play is there
any evidence of Heywood’s characteristic vocabulary and syntax.

An entry in Sir Henry Herbert’s office-book shows that The
Captives was licensed as a new play on 3 September 1624. In
the same year Hey wood included in his encyclopaedic Tuvat/cctov
or Nine Books of Various History Concerning Women, under the
title The Faire Ladie of Norwich, a version of the underplot of The
Captives much compressed yet containing the chief episodes. Is it
likely that Heywood, having thus twice made use of the whole
story, would nine years afterwards drag its central incident into
The Jew of Malta .?

On the other hand Marlowe, if he had not read Masuccio’s
novella nor its French translation by Antoine de Saint-Denis in
Les Comptes du Monde Adventureux (1555), could have drawn upon
A Mery lest of Dane Hew, Munk of Leicester (printed before 1584),^
though there the two friars are replaced by a monk and an abbot.
The central episode fitted into the scheme of Barabas for getting
rid of both the friars, though for this it was necessary that Jacomo,
unlike the abbot, should pay the death penalty. It is far more
characteristic of Marlowe than of Heywood to show the two men

* Marlowes Jew of Malta!: Stil- und Echtheitsfragen (1921).

^ A summary of the story in Dane Hew is given by Judson, op. cit.,
pp. 18-19.

ISO THE JEW OF MALTA: APPENDIX

of religion meeting their fate while trying to steal a march on each
other for the acquisition of the Jew’s wealth.

Clark would also attribute to Heywood the scenes, beginning
with Act III. i, introducing the courtesan Bellamira and her ‘bully’
Pilia-Borza, in whom he finds duplicates of Mistress Mary and
Brabo in How a Man may Choose a Good Wife from a Bad. It is
true that the scenes, iv. iv-vi, in which Bellamira makes love to
Ithamore and through him and Pilia-Borzia blackmails Barabas tiU
the Jew in the disguise of a musician kills the trio with the scent
of poisoned flowers, are spun out and somewhat loosely connected
with the main plot. The rhymed lines, iv. iv. 95-105, in which
Ithamore declares to Bellamira that they ‘will sail from hence to
Greece, to lovely Greece’, sound like a skit upon Marlowe’s
classical references and upon the refrain of his poem 7 he Passionate
Shepherd.'^ Yet in the earlier part of the scene there are, as I think,
traces of Marlowe, as quoted above. Moreover, Barabas’s use of
poisoned flowers (iv. vi. 35-43) is akin to the use of scented gloves
in 7 he Massacre at Paris for poisoning the Queen Mother of
Navarre. And in Edward 11 Lightborn boasts:

I learned in Naples how to poison flowers.

The Jew has a motive for this crime that links it with the main
action of the play. He is afraid that Ithamore will reveal his mis-
deeds to his new confederates (iv. v. 63-5) :

Well, I must seek a means to rid ’em all,

And presently^; for in his villainy

He will tell all he knows, and I shall die for ’t.

His fears are well founded, for in his cups Ithamore does tell all
(iv. vi. 14-24), and as soon as they feel the poison working on them
Bellamira and Pilia-Borza disclose the whole black record to the
Governor (v. i. 10-15);

Bell. I bring thee news by whom thy son was slain :

Mathias did it not ; it was the Jew —

Pilia. Who, besides the slaughter of these gentlemen,

Poison’d his own daughter and the nuns.

Strangled a friar, and I know not what
Mischief beside.

Some way of bringing the crimes of the Jew to light was necessary
to the plot of the play. It seems therefore probable that the Bellamira
scenes are originally Marlowe’s work, though it may have been
touched up for revivals of 7 he Jew of Malta by Heywood or another.

* See below, pp. 220-2.. ^ immediately.

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

T he only edition of The Massacre at Paris ^ an octavo
printed by Edward AUde for Edward White, has the
name of Christopher Marlowe on the title-page. The
octavo is undated and is not entered in the Stationers’
Register, probably because, as the corrupt text indicates,
it was a stolen and surreptitious copy. If the so-called
‘Collier leaf’ is accepted as authentic, and as reproducing
the original text of scene xvi, 11. i-i6, in the octavo, light
is thrown on the relation of the octavo version, of some
1,250 lines, to Marlowe’s manuscript.^

The Massacre at Paris must have been written after
the death of Henry III of France on 2 August 1589, and
probably after that of Pope Sixtus V on 17 August 1590,
as his ‘bones’ are spoken of in scene xxi, 1. 100. On the
other hand, it has to be dated before 26 January 1592/3,
when Henslowe entered in his Diary:

R[eceived] at the tragedey of the gvyes 30^ . . . iij“ xilij®.

The Guise ^ as with characteristic variants of spelling
he frequently calls the play, was marked by him on this
occasion as a new piece, and had probably been written
not long before, in the latter part of 1592. It was one
of a group of plays acted by Lord Strange’s men at the
‘Rose’ during January-February 1592/3, and the sum of
j^3 14/. taken at the performance was the highest of the
season. On 28 January the Privy Council forbade acting
of plays in London on account of the plague, and there
is no record of The Massacre being performed again till
19 June 1594, when it was staged by the Admiral’s
men at the ‘Rose’, and was given ten times between that

* See Appendix to this chapter.

^ A mistake for 26 Jan. See Greg’s edition of the Diary, i. 15, ii.
157, and the Malone Society reprint of The Massacre at Paris, p. vi.

IS2 THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

date and 25 September.^ As the title-page of the octavo
states that it was ‘plaide by the right honourable the Lord
high Admirall his Seruants^ the edition seems to have been
published after the 1594 performances and before 1596,
when his company became known as the Earl of Notting-
ham’s men.2

But there is one, at first sight, very strong argument for
dating the octavo not earlier than 1600 or 1601. In scene
xviii, 1 . 66, Guise declares, ‘Yet Caesar shall go forth’, in
words identical with Shakespeare’s Caesar^ ii. ii. 28.

It has been generally assumed that the octavo line is an
echo from Shakespeare’s play, acted probably about 1600.
But this conclusion is not necessary when we take into
account the pervasive classical influence on Marlowe’s work.
Recalling his Lucan the dramatist may well have seen in
the attempt of the Guise to overthrow the constitutional
government in France and in his death by assassination a
close counterpart to Caesar’s ambitions and kindred fate.
From the illustrations given below it may be legitimately
contended that Guise’s words were in Marlowe’s original
text and not foisted in later from Shakespeare’s play.

After arriving at this conclusion I found that it has
been reached independently and from a different angle by
John Bakeless, who writes:

‘A more careful study of the pamphlet literature of the French
wars of religion . . . shows that the Catholic party habitually
referred to their champion, the Duke of Guise, as “Caesar”, and
one of their partisans even drew up a laborious comparison
between the two heroes which occupies four printed pages.
Plainly then Marlowe wrote the line first.

Two other close parallels between The Massacre^ scene
XV, 11 . 1-2, and scene xx, 4-5, and passages in The True
Tragedy and 3 Henry VI raise the question of priority,
but do not bear directly on the date of the octavo, and

* Henslowis Diary, ed. Greg, i. 17-19.

^ For later performances in Elizabeth’s reign, see below, pp. 167-8.

^ Op. cit., p. 299.

153

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

may be considered together with the similar and more
extensive series of parallels between Edward II and the
Shakespearian plays. ^

Whatever views may be taken on these disputable points,
my own belief, as will be seen, is that the octavo of The
Massacre, in spite of its textual corruption, preserves more
of the play as it came from Marlowe’s hand, and has a
more important place in the canon of his works, than his
editors have been willing to allow. Any fruitful discus-
sion of these questions must start, in my opinion, from the
relation of the play in its present form to its source. That
source for the first ten scenes is unquestionably Book X
of Commentaries of the Civill W arres in Fraunce (1576),
by Jean de Serres, translated by T. Timme. Marlowe’s
obligation to de Serres was first pointed out by A. H.
Bullen,^ who quoted some striking parallels between the
Commentaries and the text of The Massacre, To these
one very remarkable instance has been added by H. S.
Bennett‘,3 though his general conclusion is that ‘nowhere
do we get the feeling that’ Marlowe ‘was working with
his source before him’. My own view is that the evidence
proves that he was working in this way; that nothing of
importance in his source that was material to his purpose
seems to be omitted in the octavo version; and that this
version is shown, by comparison with Book X of The
Commentaries, to preserve with general, if not purely
textual, accuracy the details of successive episodes in the
action. Full confirmation of these points could be given
only in a complete editorial apparatus, but the illustra-
tions brought forward below indicate that Marlowe was
as faithful in the first half of The Massacre to de Serres,
in Timme’s translation, as he was in the Tamhurlaine plays

* See Appendix to Chapter XL

^ Works of Marlowe (1885) ii, 243, 253. Book X, however, docs not
belong, as Bullen seems to have thought, to Three Partes of Commentaries^
published in Timme’s translation in 1574, Fourth Parte of

which Timme’s version followed in 1576.

^ See below, p. 158 n.

4427

154 the massacre AT PARIS

to Fortescue and Ortelius, in Edward II to Holinshed,
and in Doctor Faustus to ‘P. I can see nothing to sup-
port the view that ‘Marlowe’s friends probably helped to
provide material for the play ... he probably gained
still more from the Huguenot refugees who had streamed
to England’.^

For the scenes subsequent to the accession of Henry HI
to the French throne no similar single source has been
traced, though Marlowe was probably acquainted with
the pamphlet controversy concerning the papal responsi-
bility for the murder of King Henry. In any case there
does not seem sufficient material for the view tentatively
advanced by Tucker Brooke that certain passages in the
play ‘suggest first-hand acquaintance with political and
religious conditions in France’.^

Though he was dealing with French historical events
and personages, and using French sources, it is important
to stress the fact that Marlowe in this play drew his
inspiration mainly from Italy, both in its classical and its
Renaissance periods. The central figure, the Duke of
Guise, adopts more than once the very role of Julius
Caesar. In the significant monologue in which he reveals
his ambition to win the crown of France he quotes (ii.
98-9) one of the Roman dictator’s maxims :

As Caesar to his soldiers, so say I, —

Those that hate me will I learn to loathe.

King Henry, in a later scene, proves that he
realizes what is in the Duke’s mind when he cries
(xvi. 55-7):

Guise, wear our crown, and be thou King of France,

And, as dictator, make or war or peace.

Whilst I cry placet, like a senator !

In a similarly classical vein the Guise proclaims (xviii,

51-3):

* See below, pp. 203-4, 207 ff. ^ Bakeless, op. cit., pp. 252-3.

3 Life of Marlowe, p. 34 n.

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS 155

As ancient Romans o’er their captive lords,

So ^vill I triumph o’er this wanton King;

And he shall follow my proud chariot’s wheels.

Most significant of all is his imperious dismissal of the
warning that if he enters the next room he will be mur-
dered; ‘therefore, good my lord, go not forth’ (65-6):

Yet Caesar shall go forth. ^

And with his last breath he flourishes the proud parallel
between himself and the great imferator:

Thus Caesar did go forth, and thus he died.

In these classical analogies the Guise recalls some of
Tamburlaine’s speeches, and his ambition has the same
boundless scope as the Scythian’s (ii. 43-7) :

Set me to scale the high Pyramides,

And thereon set the diadem of France;

I’ll either rend it with my nails to naught,

( 3 r mount the top with my aspiring wings.

Although my downfall be the deepest hell.

There is the very ring of Tamburlaine’s voice in the
words (ii. 100-2):

Give me a look that, when I bend the brows,

Pale death may walk in furrows of my face;

A hand that with a grasp may grip the world.

If the Guise is thus linked with Caesar-Tamburlaine,
he is also akin to Barabas. The opening lines of the
Prologue to The Jew of Malta testify that the Duke was to
Marlowe a reincarnation on this side of the Alps of Machia-
velli as conceived by most Englishmen. The combination
of ‘resolution’ and craft distinctive of the Florentine’s
‘policy’, which had been practised by Barabas, reappears
in the Guise. He can play alternately both active and
passive parts to attain his end — the crown (ii. 48-9):

For this I wake, when others think I sleep.

For this I wait, that scorns attendance else.

* On the relation between this line and the same words in Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar, ii. ii. 28, see above, p. 152.

iS6 THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

He has the same contempt as the Jew for his intellectual
and social inferiors, ‘peasants’, as he repeatedly calls them.
He alone is competent to deal with

Matters of import aimed at by many,

Yet understood by none.

Machiavelli’s slogan in the Prologue to The Jew ‘I count
Religion but a childish toy’ is re-echoed by the Guise
(ii. 66-9):

Religion ! 0 Diahole !

Fie, I am asham’d, however that I seem.

To think a word of such a simple sound.

Of so great matter should be made the ground !

Thus the Duke, as presented by Marlowe, though the
character-drawing is not entirely consistent in this re-
spect, looks on religion merely as an instrument of policy.
The Pope has bestowed on him a largesse and a pension,
the Spanish Catholics send him Indian gold, Paris main-
tains five hundred colleges on behalf of the faith. But
all these are to be turned to serve his personal ambitions
(ii. 88-91):

Then, Guise,

Since thou hast all the cards within thy hands.

To shuffle or cut, take this as surest thing,

That, right or wrong, thou deal thyself a king.

To this end the Catholics are to be hounded on to
murder the Huguenots and, in their turn, the royalist
leaders are to be sacrificed. As Turks and Christians are
counters in the game to Barabas, so are the contending
factions in France to the Duke.

Thus the marriage of King Charles IX’s sister Margaret
to Henry of Navarre, with which the play opens, is an
offence to him not only because Henry is a prominent
Huguenot but because the houses of Valois and Bourbon
are thereby politically united. De Serres tells how, as a
compromise between the opposed religious views of the
two houses, the marriage was celebrated ‘in the porch of
the great church of Paris’, and that after the ceremony

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS 157

the bride was led into the church to hear mass, while the
bridegroom, with the Prince of Conde and the Admiral,
‘walked without the churche dore, wayting for the Brides
return’. This account is faithfully followed by Marlowe,
and is skilfully used to give the Huguenot leaders when
left alone the opportunity of inveighing against the de-
signs of ‘th’ aspiring Guise’.

De Serres is similarly followed, though with less skill
(at any rate in the octavo text), in the opening part of
scene ii. The Guise orders an apothecary to present per-
fumed gloves, whose smell is death, to the Queen Mother
of Navarre,

For she is that huge blemish in our eye,

That makes these upstart heresies in P'rance.

The Duke’s action becomes dramatically more plausible
when we know that Marlowe learned from de Serres that
the Queen of Navarre had played a leading part in bring-
ing about the marriage of her son and Margaret. And the
details of the outrage are taken from the French chroni-
cler. The Queen ‘died in the Court at Paris of a sodane
sicknesse . . . she was poysoned with a venomed smell of a
payre of perfumed gloues dressed by the Kings Apothe-
carie’. This was not found out at first, but afterwards
they opened her head and found traces of the poison in
her brain. This is echoed in her dying cry (iii. 19-20):

the fatal poison

Works within my head: my brain-pan breaks.

The other outrage that abruptly follows in the same
scene, the shooting of the Admiral through the arm by
a soldier from an upper window, also follows closely the
account by de Serres.

These crimes are the prelude to the general massacre
of the Huguenots in which the Guise has as his chief
confederates the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici,
and the heir to the throne, the Duke of Anjou. Half-
hearted opposition comes from King Charles, another of
the weak sovereigns who are foils to Marlowe’s men of

158 THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

destiny. He pleads against the proposed massacre to
Catherine (iv. 5-12):

Madam, it will be noted through the world
An action bloody and tyrannical;

Chiefly, since under safety of our word
They justly challenge their protection:

Besides, my heart relents that noble men.

Only corrupted in religion,

Ladies of honour, knights and gentlemen.

Should, for their conscience taste such ruthless ends.

But he weakly lets himself be overruled, and he pays
a visit to the Admiral, ‘discovered in bed’, to give him
a hypocritical assurance that he will be guarded from
further harm. It has only recently been proved how
closely Marlowe follows de Serres at this point. The King
gives orders (iv. 64-6) :

Cossin,* take twenty of our strongest guard,

And, under your direction, see they keep
All treacherous violence from our noble friend.

This is based on the chronicler’s statement: ‘There-
with the Duke of Aniou the Kings brother commanded
Cossin Captaine of the Kings guarde to place a certaine
band of souldiers to warde the Admiralles gate.’ And the
details of the Admiral’s murder in scene v are also taken
from de Serres, and skilfully adapted to stage conditions.
The Admiral is again ‘discovered in bed’, but this time
on the upper stage, for when he is killed, the Duke cries,
‘Then throw him down’. When this is done, Anjou bids
Guise

view him well,

It may be it is some other, and he escap’d.

And the Duke replies, ‘Cousin, ’tis he; I know him by his
look.’ All this is based directly upon the chronicle, where

* This was printed ‘Cosin’ in the octavo, in roman type, not in the
italic used for names. The printer, like a long series of editors, took it to
mean ‘Cousin’. It was H. S. Bennett who first pointed out, in his edition
of the play, p. 196 n., that it stands for ‘Cossin’, the captain of the guard,
here and in v. 20.

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS 159

the Admiral’s body is thrown out of the window and
‘owing to the blood on the face, they could not well
discerne him. The Duke kneeling wiped away the blood,
and sayd “now I know him, it is he”.’^

Thereupon an ordinance is shot off and a bell tolled as
the signal for the beginning of the general massacre.
Marlowe gets over the difficulty of representing this on
the stage by giving some vivid ‘snapshots’, displaying
incidentally the acid humour which has been an insuffi-
ciently recognized element in his genius. When the Pro-
testant Loreine proclaims himself ‘a preacher of the word
of God’, the Guise with a mockery of Puritan phraseo-
logy retorts, as he stabs him (v. 69), ‘Dearly beloved
brother — thus ’tis written’, and Anjou adds, ‘Stay, my
lord, let me begin the psalm’. When another Huguenot,
Seroune, faced with death, cries, ‘O Christ, my Saviour’,
his murderer throws the prayer back in his teeth (v. 80) :

Christ, villain !

Why, darest thou presume to call on Christ,

Without the intercession of some saint ?

Sanctus Jacobus^ he ’s my saint; pray to him.

The cries of hunted victims shatter the silence of what
should be a sanctuary of learning, the study of the King’s
Professor of Logic, Petrus Ramus, ‘sitting at his book’.
Here again de Serres furnished Marlowe with a starting-
point when he related that among those murdered were
‘many singularly learned professors and teachers of good
artes and among the rest Petrus Ramus^ that renowned
man throughout the worlde’. This was enough to recall
to the dramatist echoes of the academic controversies of
his Cambridge days. Ramus in his lectures in the Uni-

* There are two points in Marlowe’s representation of the Admiral’s
death which suggest that he may also have used The lyfe of .. . Jasper
Colignie by de Serres, translated by A. Golding (1576). The mention there
of ‘certein Swissers of the Duke of Anjous guard’ may account for
Anjou’s order (v. 17), ‘Switzers, keep you the streets’; and the Admiral’s
last words, ‘I commende my sowle to Gods mercy’, seem to be echoed in
(v. 30), ‘O God, forgive my sins!’

i6o THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

versity of Paris had created a sensation by attacks upon
the Aristotelian system of logic. Translations of his
Dialectic a had appeared in England in 1574 and 1581,
and two editions of the original Latin in 1576 and 1584,
the latter of which was published at Cambridge, where
the University was for long divided between the partisans
of the rival systems.* The controversy is now transferred
by Marlowe from the classroom to the death-chamber,
and no discourse by Tamburlaine on the battle-field upon
poetry or cosmology is more incongruous than Guise’s
apologia for Aristotelian logic before bidding Anjou stab
Ramus to death (vi. 26-7) :

Was it not thou that scoff ’dst the Organon,

And said it was a heap of vanities f

Scoffingly quoting a ^quiddity’ of Ramus about the
argumentum inartijiciale he gives it a practical refutation

(vi. 35-7):

To contradict which, I say, Ramus shall die:

How answer you that ? your nego argumentum
Cannot serve, sirrah. — Kill him.

Ramus pleads for a pause in which to purge himself:

I knew the Organon to be confus’d.

And I reduc’d it into better form;

And this for Aristotle will I say.

That he that despiseth him can ne’er
Be good in logic or philosophy.

But the recantation is of no avail. The ^collier’s son’
is sent to his doom. And he is speedily followed by two
other men of learning, the ‘schoolmasters’ of Navarre and
Condd who here, as in de Serres, are killed while their
patrons’ lives are saved. Then the Guise silences the beU
that rings ‘to the devil’s mattins’, and the fury is stayed
in Paris itself, though the heretics who hold their ‘syna-
gogue’ in the neighbouring woods are to be hunted out and
killed, and those in the provinces are to be put to the sword.

From this point the play develops on lines that are

* For the influence of Ramus on Cambridge studies see J. B. MuUinger’s
The University of Cambridge, ii. 404-13.

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS i6i

independent, so far as has been traced, of any particular
source. Catherine, the Queen Mother, determines to get
rid of her faint-hearted son Charles, who has begun to
lament the Guise’s ‘late night’s work’ in Paris, and whom
she suspects of plotting with his brother-in-law Navarre
(viii. 40-5):

As I do live, so surely shall he die,

And Henry then shall wear the diadem ;

And if he grudge or cross his mother’s will.

I’ll disinherit him and all the rest;

For I’ll rule France, but they shall wear the crown,

And if they storm, I then may pull them down.

In scene x Charles is stricken with ‘a sudden pang, the
messenger of death’, which, in spite of Catherine’s hypo-
critical lamentations, he suspects may be the work of his
‘dearest friends’. Henry III succeeds, recalled to France
from the elective throne of Poland. It is to be noted that
Marlowe discriminates the characters of the two brothers.
Charles had been weak but high-principled : Henry is
dissolute and pleasure-loving. In almost his first words
after his accession he asks (xi. 16-17):

What says our minions ? think they Henry’s heart
Will not both harbour love and majesty

His thoughts run at once to revelry (39-42) :

Our solemn rites of coronation done.

What now remains but for a while to feast,

And spend some days in barriers, tourney, tilt.

And like disports, such as do fit the court? 2

In the frivolous preoccupations of the new king his
mother sees the opportunity of establishing her own
authority with the aid of an army raised by the Guise,
nominally against the Huguenots but really to overawe

* Bennett points out in his edition of the play, p. 217 n., that this is
a reminiscence of Ovid, Met. ii. 846.

^ Marlowe here transfers to Henry a love of Hisports’ which de Serres
had attributed to Charles : ‘So great was the preparation of playes, so grcaic
was the magnificence of banquets and shewes, and the King so earnestly
bent to those matters.’

4427

i62 the massacre AT PARIS

the throne. Again she proclaims her ruthless ambition
(xi. 63-6) :

if he do deny what I do say,

I’ll despatch him with his brother presently,

And then shall Monsieur wear the diadem.

Tush, all shall die unless I have my will.

In the next scene a personal factor in the Guise’s
hostility to Henry and his retinue is abruptly introduced.
The Duchess is discovered by her husband writing a letter
of assignation to one of the King’s minions, Mugeroun,
who in scene xvi pays with his life for his amorous intrigue.
As has been shown, it is an almost constant factor of
Marlowe’s technique to attach rival lovers to the women
in his plays. ^ But even if the episode is imperfectly ren-
dered in the octavo text,^ the Duke’s enmity to the King
falls to a lower plane when motived by revenge for a minion’s
wrongdoing rather than by ambition for a throne.

By Navarre the Guise is seen in another aspect, as one
of a trio with the Pope and the King of Spain (xiii. 5 ff .) :

Who set themselves to tread us underfoot.

And rend our true religion from this land

Spain is the council-chamber of the Pope,

Spain is the place where he makes peace and war;

And Guise for Spain hath now incens’d the king
To send his power to meet us in the field.

To audiences in the post-Armada years such lines must
have had more than a merely dramatic significance, as
also the dialogue between Navarre and Bartus after the
Huguenot victory over the royalist army led by Joyeux,
closing with Navarre’s clarion-call (xv. 12-17):

But God we know will always put them down
That lift themselves against the perfect truth :

Which I’ll maintain so long as life doth last.

And with the Queen of England join my force
To beat the papal monarch from our lands.

And keep those relics from our countries’ coasts.

^ See above, pp. 54-5 and 140. ^ See Appendix to this chapter.

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS 163

Meanwhile the rift between the French court and the
faction of the Guise widens. The Duke proclaims that
he must stand on his guard against his enemies, and there-
fore ‘being able, I’ll keep an host in pay’. Epernoun,
another of Henry’s minions, retorts tauntingly (xvi. 37-
40):

Thou able to maintain an host in pay,

Thou livest by foreign exhibition! ^

The Pope and King of Spain are thy good friends;

Else all France knows how poor a duke thou art.

When the King echoes the taunt, the Duke tries to
disarm suspicion by asserting that he is moved by religious
zeal and a desire for Henry’s safety, but that he will
speedily break up his camp. Warned again by Epernoun
Henry determines to forestall him, ‘as I live, so sure the
Guise shall die’. He double-crosses him much as Ferneze
does Barabas in The Jew of Malta, The words with which
the King has him admitted to the audience-chamber from
which he is not to depart alive recall the fate of the Jew
(xviii. 31-2):

Come, Guise, and see thy traitorous guile outreacli’d.

And perish in the pit thou mad’st for me.

To the last he acts in character. Fie disdains the warn-
ing of the doom that awaits him (68-70) :

Let mean consaits and baser men fear death:

Tut, they are peasants; I am Duke of Guise;

And princes with their looks engender fear.

When wounded to death he haughtily disdains the mur-
derer’s admonition ‘to pray to God, and ask forgiveness
of the King’. It is not pardon, divine or human, that he
craves :

Trouble me not; I ne’er offended Him,

Nor will I ask forgiveness of the King.

maintenance.

i64 the massacre AT PARIS

Like Barabas in his extremity he dies defiant and
execrating his enemies (82-7):

Ah, Sixtus, be reveng’d upon the King!

Philip and Parma, I am slain for you 1
Pope, excommunicate, Philip, depose
The wicked branch of curs’d Valois his line!

Vive la messe! perish. Huguenots!

Thus Caesar did go forth, and thus he died.

Over the body of Guise the King speaks words ad-
dressed more to the Londoners in the audience than to
the French courtiers on the stage (100-6):

This is the traitor that hath spent my gold
In making foreign wars and civil broils.

Did he not draw a sort of English priests
From Douay to the Seminary at Rheims,

To hatch forth treason ’gainst their natural queen
Did he not cause the King of Spain’s huge fleet
'Po threaten England and to menace me

But there was a sadistic as well as a patriotic strain in
the Elizabethan groundlings that was now gratified by
seeing the Duke’s high-spirited boy brought in to gaze on
his murdered father, and hurried to prison after a childish
effort at revenge. There is more justification, dramatic
and historical, for Henry’s order to kill the Guise’s
brothers, the Cardinal and Dumaine. In his shrewdly
caustic phrase (132-3):

These two will make one entire Duke of Guise,

Especially with our old mother’s help.

But for his old mother, entering as he speaks, the
Guise’s death means the end of all things. To Henry’s
plea that he killed the Duke because T would be king’
she turns a deaf ear, denouncing him as a changeling,
not her son. And when the King leaves her to ‘grieve

^ Is this an echo of the accusation against Marlowe himself in 1587
from which he was defended by the Privy Council ?

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS 165

her heart out’, she shows more unmistakably than before
that it is for her faith that she has sought power
(155-60):

To whom shall I bewray my secrets now
Or who will help to build religion ?

The Protestants will glory and insult ;

Wicked Navarre will get the crown of France;

The Popedom cannot stand; all goes to wrack
And all for thee, my Guise !

Then follows an unforeseen turn of the wheel. Du-
maine has escaped his brothers’ fate and becomes the
confidant of a Jacobin friar bent on the ‘meritorious’ deed
of killing a king who had been lukewarm in the Papal
cause. Henry with his ally Navarre is besieging Paris, still
faithful to the house of Guise. Entering his camp the
Friar hands him a letter, and as he reads it stabs him with
a knife, ‘and then the king gets the knife and kills him’.
Again Henry addresses the audience rather than those
on the stage (xxi. 47-52):

all rebels under heaven
Shall take example by his punishment,

How they bear arms against their sovereign.

Go call the English agent hither straight :

Pll send my sister England news of this.

And give her warning of her treacherous foes.

To the agent he pours forth, without historical warrant,
a violent diatribe against ‘accursed Rome’, and vows
eternal love to Navarre,

And to the Queen of England specially.

Whom God hath blessed for hating papistry.

His declamation is cut short by the surgeon’s announce-
ment that his wound is fatal from a poisoned knife — a re-
finement added by Marlowe, recallingthe poisoned porridge
and flowers in The Jew of Malta, Henry has only time
to announce to his courtiers that Navarre is ‘your lawful

i66 THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

king, and my next heir’, and to urge them to avenge his
death. Navarre accepts the legacy, vowing that

Rome, and all those popish prelates there,

Shall curse the time that e’er Navarre was king.

And rul’d in France by Henry’s fatal death.

Whenever these words were written they were to be
given a surprisingly ironic significance in July 1593, two
months after Marlowe’s death, by Navarre’s conversion
to Roman Catholicism.

In the above interpretation of The Massacre at Paris
I have attempted to suggest that the play is of greater
merit, and has more significance in the Marlovian canon,
than has hitherto been recognized. For what seems to me
to be its undervaluation there are three chief reasons.
The first and most important is the corrupt octavo text.
But when all its imperfections have been taken into
account, much of the action is closely knit and the dia-
logue often has a keen edge. There are none of the dazzling
purple passages of Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus^ but
there is scarcely a scene which has not in some of its lines
or phrases the distinctive Marlovian note.

Secondly, even the editors who have known that Mar-
lowe drew chiefly from de Serres have not, as I think,
sufficiently considered the play in that special relation,
and in the light of what we now realize to have been
Marlowe’s fidelity to his sources. A play called The
Massacre at Paris may be excused for containing an unduly
rapid succession of blood-curdling incidents, and it has
been shown above that in these the dramatist is closely
following his original, and often skilfully adapting his
material to the resources of the contemporary stage.

Thirdly, in the scene of the murder of the Guise it has
been generally assumed that the Duke’s identification of
himself with Caesar w^as inserted at a revival of The
Massacre subsequent to the performance of Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar, and that the words were borrowed from
that play. But in view of Marlowe’s delight in classical

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS 167

allusions and parallels, and the frequency of his references
to Caesar in particular, it is probable that the debt to
Shakespeare is imaginary and that the octavo here repre-
sents Marlowe’s own text.

Consistent character-drawing is never to be expected
from Marlowe, and it is not found in any of the too
slightly sketched figures in The Massacre, Yet, as has been
seen, the two French kings are differentiated in their
failings. The dominant and aspiring personalities of the
Guise and the Queen Mother are also discriminated and,
though the drawing wavers, the Duke’s ambition is pic-
tured as primarily for himself alone and Catherine’s as in
the interests of her faith. Both are set off by the selflessly
righteous aims of Navarre. His outspoken Protestant
sentiments combined with Henry Hi’s sympathetic refer-
ences to Elizabeth and England doubtless found a ready
response in the theatre and account for the play’s con-
tinued popularity throughout the Queen’s reign.

After its first production by Henslowe at the 4 <osc’ in
January 1593 it was revived at the same theatre on 19 June
1594, and had ten performances between that date and

25 September. I A later revival took place in or soon
after November 1598 when Henslowe on the 19th lent
William Borne or Birdc, who acted the Guise, twelve
shillings that he might ‘Jmbrader his hatte’,^ and on the
27th a further sum of twenty shillings that he might ‘bye
a payer of sylke stockens’ in which to perform the part.^
It was evidently an expensive play to dress. When it was
again revived in November 1601, three pounds were paid
for ‘stamell cllath’^ for a cloak, and other sums to the
‘littell taylor Radford’ for further materials and for work
upon suits for the play. After final payment of his bill on

26 November, 14^. 6 d. had been laid out on costumes. s

* See above, pp. 15 1-2. ^ Jlenslozve'’s Diary ^ cd. Oreg i. 7<S’.

2 Ibid. i. 72. Below this entry, without a date, appears another loan
to Borne for the same amount ‘to bye his stockens for the gwissc’. Is this
in addition or a duplicate ?

a red woollen fabric. ^ For full details see ibid. i. 1 49-5 1.

i68 THE MASSACRE AT PARIS

About seven weeks afterwards, on i8 January 1602, the
Admiral’s men bought the play, with two others, from
Edward Alleyn for six pounds.* But so far as The Massacre
at Paris was concerned, this was probably not a profitable
investment. In the following July the British Ambassador
in Paris, Sir Ralph Winwood, objected to the performance
of a play introducing Queen Elizabeth. The retort was
made ‘that the Death of the Duke of Guise hath been
plaied at London’, and ‘that the Massacre of St. Bartholo-
mew hath been publickly acted, and this King^ represented
upon the Stage’. ^ The English Government’s anxiety not
to ruffle French susceptibilities may well account for the
apparent disappearance of The Massacre at Paris hence-
forward from the stage.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER X

The Collier Leaf of ‘The Massacre at Paris'^

J. P. CoTXiER in his Introduction to The Jew of Malta in volume viii
of his edition of Dodsley’s Old Plays (1825) stated that ‘a curious
manuscript fragment of one quarto leaf’ of The Massacre at Paris
was in the hands of Rodd, a London bookseller. He printed a
transcript of it, showing that it was an expanded form of the very
short scene in which a soldier, hired by Guise, kills Mugeroun,
When Collier published his History of English Dramatic Poetry
(1831) he printed a corrected transcript of the leaf, with a note
showing that it was now in his possession. From his hands it
passed successively into those of J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, M. J,
Perry, and H. C. Folger, and is now preserved in the Folger
Shakespeare Library in Washington.

While it was in Folger’s hands in New York it was inaccessible
and could not be seen by Tucker Brooke for his edition of Mar-
lowe’s Works (1910), by W. W. Greg for the Malone reprint of
The Massacre (1928), or by H. S. Bennett for his edition of the

* Ibid. i. 153.

^ The reigning king of France, Henry IV, the Navarre of The Massacre.

^ Quoted, in more detail, by J. Bakeless, op. cit., p. 251, from
E. Sawyer, Memorials of Ajffairs of State (1725), i. 425.

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS: APPENDIX 169

play (1931)- Their views upon its authenticity had therefore to
be tentative. But it has now been examined by J. Quincy Adams
its custodian in the Folger Shakespeare Library, who reproduced
it in facsimile with a transcript in modernized spelling and
punctuation in ^he Library, March 1934.* I print his transcript
here for comparison with the octavo version which follows, also
with modernized spelling and punctuation, in Bennett’s edition
of the play, but in both cases with the omission of such stage-
directions as they have added.

[MS. Version]

Enter a Soldier with a musket.

Soldier. Now, sir, to you that dares make a Duke a cuckold, and use a
counterfeit key to his privy-chamber: though you take out none but your
own treasure, yet you put in that displeases him, and fill up his room that
he should occupy. Herein, sir, you forestall the market, and set up your
standing where you should not. But you will say you leave him room
enough besides. That’s no answer; he’s to have the choice of his own free
land. If it be not too free — there’s the question! Now, sir, where he is
your landlord, you take upon you to be his, and will needs enter by default.
W'hat though you were once in possession, yet coming upon you once
unawares he frayed you out again! Therefore your entry is mere intrusion.
This is against the law, sir; and though I come not to keep possession (as
I would I might!) yet 1 come to keep you out, sir. You arc welcome, sir;
have at you.

Enter minion, lie kills him.

Minion. Traiterous Guise! Ah, thou hast murdered me.

Enter Guise.

Guise. 1 lold thee, tall soldier. Take thee this and fly.

Thus fall, imperfect exhalation,

(Which our great sun of France could not effect),

A fiery meteor in the firmament!

Jdc there the King’s delight, and Guise’s scorn!

Revenge it, Henry, if thou list, or dar’st.

1 did it only in despite of thee.

Fondly hast thou incens’d the Guise’s soul,

That of itself was hot enough to work
Thy just digestion with extremest shame !

^ At the end of Adams’s article Greg adds an ‘unedited transcript’ in
the original spelling and punctuation.

4427 Z

170 THE MASSACRE AT PARIS: APPENDIX

The army I have gathered now shall aim
More at thy end than exterpation ;

And when thou think’st I have forgotten this,

And that thou most reposest on my faith,

Then will I wake thee from thy foolish dream
And let thee see thyself my prisoner.

Exeunt.

[Octavo Version]

Enter a Soldier,

Soldier. Sir, to you, sir, that dares make the duke a cuckold, and use a
counterfeit key to his privy-chamber-door; and although you take out
nothing but your own, yet you put in that which displeaseth him, and so
forestall his market, and set up your standing where you should not;
and whereas he is your landlord, you will take upon you to be his, and till
the ground that he himself should occupy, which is his own free land; if
it be not too free — there’s the question; and though I come not to take
possession (as I would I might!) yet I mean to keep you out: which I will,
if this gear hold.

Enter Mugeroun.

What, arc ye come so soon ? have at ye, sir !

He shoots at him and kills him

Enter the Guise

Hold thee, tall soldier, take thee this, and fly. Exit Soldier

I/ie there, the king’s delight, and Guise’s scorn!

Revenge it, Henry, as thou list or dare;

I did it only in despite of thee.

Take him away

Adams shows that Collier was wrong in speaking of ‘a quarto
leaf’; it is the lower portion of a folio leaf. The recto has been
filled by the scribe and nine lines added on the verso which has
otherwise been left blank. Adams suggests that ‘the manuscript
is a preliminary or tentative draft of a single episode, written on
a bit of blank paper that happened to be at hand’; the bit was
one of the ‘foul sheets’ often used by Elizabethan dramatists
before making their fair copy. If so, it would naturally be in
Marlow’s own script, though we have no undoubted specimen by
which to test it. It might even, if fancy is given rein, have been
shuffled among the ‘waste and idle papers’ when Marlowe and

THE MASSACRE AT PARIS; APPENDIX 171

Kyd were writing in one chamber in 1591 and which were seized
by the Government agents on 12 May 1593.*

This, in whole or part, is an attractive speculation, and Adams,
in my opinion, rebuts successfully Samuel A. Tanncnbaum’s
attacks upon the authenticity of the manuscript^ on the grounds
of its ink, its penmanship, and other considerations. Yet in the
light of Collier’s record as a forger a doubt remains, and one would
like to know the provenance of the leaf before it came into the
hands of the bookseller Rodd.

But I agree with Adams that the strongest internal evidence of
the genuineness of the leaf lies in two passages which at first sight
are questionable. The word ‘digestion’ in 1 . 10 of Guise’s speech
here means dissolution by heat, and carries on the metaphor of
‘incens’d’ and ‘hot’ in the two previous lines. This is a verbal use
natural to Marlowe, but which is very unlikely to have occurred to
a forger. And when Guise declares, 11 . 1 1-12, that his aim now will
be more at effecting King Henry’s end than at ‘exterpation’ of the
Huguenots he is continuing the contrast of the two motives that
drive him in different ways.

If the leaf is genuine I look upon it as a support to my view
formed on other grounds that in the octavo text of The Massacre
at Paris we have, though in a cut version, the essential features
of Marlowe’s play. The differences in the two versions of the
soldier’s prose speech do not amount to much. It is true that only
four out of the sixteen lines of Guise’s speech were printed, but
except in two small points they are identical in the manuscript
and the octavo, and they contain the pith of the matter which is
expanded and decorated in the other lines.

^ Adams, however, is not accurate in saying that Kyd states in his
letter to Puckering that Marlowe occasionally left fragments ot his work
lying about. The fragments belonging to Marlowe which got sliufiled
with Kyd’s papers were parts of a theological treatise by ‘the late Arrian’.

^ In Shakesperian Scraps, pp. 177-86 (1933).

THE TROUBLESOME REIGN OF EDWARD
THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND

I ^DWARD 11 was entered in the Stationers^ Register
to William Jones on 6 July 1593, little more than a
month after Marlowe’s death. An edition may have ap-
peared in that year. An imperfect copy of the 1598 quarto
of the play in the South Kensington Museum has the
first two leaves, containing the title-page and seventy lines
of the text, supplied in manuscript.^ The date on the title-
page is 1593 and the imprint is ‘at London for William
Jones’. There are textual variants between the manu-
script and all the printed editions, but it is much closer
to that of 1594 than of 1598.^ Some of its readings are
preferable but others are evident mistakes. It looks
probable, as H. B. Charlton and A. D. Waller have sug-
gested,^ that there was an edition of Edward 11 in 1593
hastily printed from manuscript to catch a public stiU
excited by Marlowe’s death. In such circumstances the
copies would be quickly exhausted, and there would soon
be a call for a new edition.

However this may have been, there appeared in 1594
an octavo published by Jones, with a title-page which
ran: The troublesome [ raigne and lamentable death of |
Edward the second, King of | England : with the tragicall |
fall of frond Mortimer: | As it was sundrie times publiquely
acted I in the honourable Citie of London, by the | right
honourable the Earle of Pern- | brooke his seruants. | Written
by Chri. Marlow Gent, Of this edition only two copies are

* These are reproduced in facsimile in the Malone Society reprint of
Edward II, edited by W. W. Greg. The neat Italian script probably
belongs to the earlier seventeenth century.

^ The title-page is identical in wording with that of the 1594 octavo,
but ‘Marlow* is abbreviated to ‘Mar:*.

3 See their edition of Edward II, p. 4 (1933).

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND 173

known, both in continental libraries, one in Cassel and
the other in Zurich. Another quarto edition, also pub-
lished hy Jones, and giving the name of the printer,
Richard Bradocke, followed in 1598. It added on the
title-page after ‘Mortimer’: ‘And also the life and death
of Peirs Gaueston, | the Great Earle of Cornewall and
mighty favourite of King Edward the Second’. It omitted
th^ particular reference to performances in London,
^^^itherto Marlowe’s plays had been acted by the Lord
Admiral’s company which was in combination with Lord
Strange’s men from about 1590 to 1594. If, as Tucker
Brooke has suggested,^ it was Lo rd Strange who was the
employer of Kyd and Marlowe when they were writing
together in 1591, and who was outrage d by the latter’s
atheism, Marlowe may have lookeci out for another
theatrical patron in the Earl of Pembroke. But nothing
is known of his company till near the close of 1 592 when
it was at Leicester.^ On 26 December 1592 and 6 January
1593 it performed at court. A provincial tour followed,
and when the company returned to London in the middle
of August it was bankrupt. Henslowe wrote to Alleyn on
28 September: ‘As for my Lord of Pembroke’s . . . they
are ^11 at home and have been these, five or six weeks, for
they cannot save their charges with travel, as I hear, and
were fain to pawn their apparel.’

Unless therefore Pembroke’s company was in being
earlier than we have any record it seems that Edward II
cannot have been acted in London before December
1592, and it probably was written in that year. But the
question of its date is involved with the problem of a per-
plexing series of parallel passages between Edward II and
several other Elizabethan plays which needs separate con-
sideration.^

The reference by Machiavelli in the prologue to The
Jew of Malta to the death of the Guise in whom he was

* Life of Marlowe, p. 48.

^ J. T. Murray, English Dramatic Companies, i. 72 and ii. 305.

3 See Appendix to this chapter.

174 the troublesome REIGN OF

reincarnate has focused attention on the relation be-
tween that play and The Massacre at Paris, It has thus
helped to prevent recognition of the parallelism between
The Massacre^ in its later scenes, and Edward //, King
of England.

In the French historical play, after the death of
Charles IX the throne is occupied by a king, Henry III,
who neglects affairs of state for shows and festivities, and
who lavishes affection on the ^ minion s’ who minister to
his pleasures. His sovereignty is overshadow ed in his own
capkaUbyAii^Js^iring noble ancTliis associates^ He~alien-
ates the woman'^bTstafid^ nearest to “the throne, and he
brinj;s upon himself th^ hostility of the Papacy and its
adherents. ^

When Marlowe laid aside his de Serres and opened his
Holinshed he found in the English chronicler’s account of
‘the pitifull tragedie’ of Edward IPs reign all these ele-
ments reproduced. The perspective is largely altered, but
it is scarcely too much to say that scenes xi-xxi of The
Massacre are something in the nature of a preliminary
sketch for Edward II. It will be seen that there are even
some striking verbal correspondences. Hence I cannot
share the view of Charlton and Waller^ that ‘the drama-
tist’s imagination was no doubt first drawn to the subject
by the pathos and horror of Edward’s end, which had
already produced the most moving parts of Holinshed’s
account’. Marlowe, I believe, plunged into his plots
without much forethought of what the ending was to be.
Why, then, out of all the rich material provided by
Holinshed did he choose the comparatively unattractive
reign of Edward H ? The reason is, I believe, to be mainly
found in the relation between the king and Gaveston
which he brings into the forefront of the play. Homo-
sexual affection, without emphasis on its more depraved
aspects, had (as has been seen) a special attraction for
Marlowe. Jove and Ganymede in Dido, Henry III and
his ‘minions’ in The Massacre, Neptune and Leander in
* Op. cit., p. 36.

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND 175

Hero and Leander^^ are all akin, though drawn to a slighter
scale, to Edward and Gaveston. The parallel to Jupiter
and his cup-bearer is a fact brought home to the audience
by the deserted queen (i. iv. 178-81):

Like frantic Juno will I fill the earth

With ghastly murmur of my sighs and cries;

For never doted Jove on Ganymede

As much as he on cursed Gaveston.

Even more significant is the roll-call of illustrious pre-
cedents in I. iv. 390-6:

The mightiest kings have had their minions:

Great Alexander lov’d Hephacstion ;

The conquering Hercules for Hylas wept;

And for Patroclus stern Achilles droop’d.

And not kings only, but the wisest men :

The Roman Tully loved Octavius;

Grave Socrates, wild Alcibiades.

Among the classical influences to which Marlowe as
poet and dramatist was so readily responsive the particular
feature of which these lines are a partly distorted record
had no unimportant place. Hence, ydiile-Holiiishc^ ir^
d etail ed account ol Edward^s reign give^ only limited
space to Gay^stOT, Marlqvye makes him the centre of the
firsFhalf of the play. This deals with the five years of his
career as the king’s favourite (1307-12), while the second
half covers the much longer period till the execution of
Mortimer in 13 30.^ /The selection and rearrangement of
material thus involved presented a series of problems to
Marlowe which he met, if not with perfect accomplish-
ment, yet with a technical skill and artistry that raised
the chronicle-history for the first time to the true level
of tragedy. ^

The opening paragraphs of Holinshed’s account of the
reign gave the dramatist just the cue that he wanted.

* See below, p. 227.

^ A valuable time-analysis, in which Holinshed's dates arc affixed to
each of Marlowe’s scenes, is provided by Charlton and Waller, op. cit.,

PP- 33-5*

176 THE TROUBLESOME REIGN OF

Gaveston, recalled from exile and loaded with honours,
humoured the king, who was ^passing his time in volup-
tuous pleasure, and riotous excesse’. He Turnished his
court with companies of iesters, ruffians, flattering para-
sites, musicians, and other vile and naughtie ribalds, that
the king might spend both daies and nights in iesting,
plaieing, blanketing, and in such other filthie and dis-
honorable exercises’. These words are echoed by Gave-
ston as he sets foot again in London, and prepares to run
into Edward’s arms (i. i. 51-6):

I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits,

Musicians that with touching of a string
May draw the pliant king which way I please.

Music and poetry is his delight;

Therefore Pll have Italian masks by night,

Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows.

And then follow classical embellishments, added by
Marlowe, of nymphs and satyrs, Diana and Actaeon —

Such things as these best please his majesty.

Holinshed further states that the King using Gaveston
as ‘a procurer of his disordred dooings . . . began to have
his nobles in no regard, to set nothing by their instruc-
tions, and to take small heed vnto the good gouernement
of the commonwealth’. It is on this and similar state-
ments that Marlowe bases the display of hostilit y to
Gaveston by the barons even before he meets the king
on his return. Of the peers named by Holinshed as the
favourite’s chief enemies only the Earl of Warwick is here
introduced. For the Earl of Lincoln the dramatist substi-
tutes his son-in-law, the Earl of Lancaster, who was finally
possessed of five ea rldg ms. ‘He was’, says the chronicler,'
‘the greatest Pere in the Realm, and one of the mightiest
Erles in Christendom.’ He was thus the nearest counter-
part in fourteenth-century England to the Duke of Guise
in sixteenth-century France, and it might have been
expected that Marlowe would make him play the corre-
sponding role of protagonist in the opposition of the

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF fmot ^ND 177

nobility to the king, who even tt enounc es him as ‘aspiring
Lancaster’. But he died five years before Edward, and
it would have been too violent a di stprtin n of history to
represent him as responsible for the king’s final tragedy.
Marlowe preferred the minor liberty of pre-dating the
rebellious activities of Roger Mortimer of Chirk and his
nephew Roger Mortimer of Wigmore. In Holinshcd’s
account they do not come to the fore till after Gaveston’s
fall, but in the play they take from the first the lead in the
opposition to him. When the Earl of Kent, the king’s
half-brother, rebukes their insolence, Mortimer (as the
nephew wiU here be called) retorts in fury (i. i. 125-6):

Come, uncle, let us leave this brain-sick king,

And henceforth parley with our naked swords.

This is in the Guise-Tamburlaine vein, and Lancaster
uses plainer and coarser threats:

Adieu, my lord; and cither change your mind,

Or look to see the throne, where you should sit,

To float in blood; and at thy wanton head.

The glozing head of thy base minion thrown.

The nobles gone, Edward speaks after the manner of
Henry III in The Massacre:

I cannot brook these haughty menaces;

Am I a king and must be overrurd

When Gaveston comes forward and presents himself he
embraces him rapturously, and, in spite of warning words
from Kent, showers titles and offices upon him. The
favourite in his adroit reply uses a classical simile which
had come more aptly from the lips of the Guise

It shall suffice me to enjoy your love,

Which whiles I have, I think myself as great.

As Caesar riding in the Roman street,

With captive kings at his triumphant car.

The episode that follows, the arrest of the Bishop of
Coventry, who had procured Gaveston’s banishment,

^ See above, pp. 155-6, and Appendix.

178 THE TROUBLESOME REIGN OF

comes from Holinshed, but is skilfully elaborated by
Marlowe to reveal the spiteful cruelty of the king and the
favourite. The latter lays hands on the Bishop, with the
mocking words, ‘Saving your reverence, you must pardon
me’, and the dialogue continues (i. i. 187 ff.):

K. Edw. Throw off his golden mitre, rend his stole,

And in the channel christen him anew.

Kent. Ah, brother, lay not violent hands on him !

For he’ll complain unto the see of Rome.

Gav. Let him complain unto the see of hell;

I’ll be reveng’d on him for my exile.

K. Edw. No, spare his life, but seize upon his goods.

Gav. He shall to prison and there die in bolts.

K. Edw. But in the meantime, Gaveston, away,

And take possession of his house and goods.

This outrage further Incenses the peers, who resent the
favourite’s insolent familiarity with his sovereign (i. ii.

23-4) ••

Thus leaning on the shoulder of the king,

He nods and scorns, and smiles at those that pass.

While they are conferring, the most hapless victim of
the king’s infatuation, his young queen, enters hurriedly
and is significantly first addressed by Mortimer, to whom
she confides that she is fleeing to the forest ‘to live in
grief’ (i. ii. 49-52):

For now my lord the king regards me not.

But dotes upon the love of Gaveston,

He claps his cheeks, and hangs about his neck,

Smiles in his face, and whispers in his ears.

Yet when the lords threaten to take up arms on her
behalf she protests :

for rather than my lord
Shall be oppress’d by civil mutinies,

I will endure a melancholy life
And let him frolic with his minion.

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND 179

As yet, in spite of his neglect, Edward still holds sway
over Isabella’s heart. The Archbishop of Canterbury is
also against violence, and on his advice the Lords of the
Council meet at the New Temple to re-enact Gavestoif s
banishment. While they are in session the king enters
with the favourite, whom he places in the highest seat next
himself. The elder Mortimer voices his indignation in
an Ovidian phrase, Quam male conveniunt^ which had
been more explicitly anglicized in 7 he Massacre,^ After
a brisk interchange of abuse Gaveston is forcibly removed,
and again Edward speaks in the very tones of Henry HP
0. iv. 36-8);

Here, Mortimer, sit thou in Edward’s throne;

Warwick and Lancaster, wear you my crown ;

Was ever king thus overrul’d as I ?

He refuses his assent to his minion’s banishment till the
Archbishop, as Papal Legate, threatens to release the lords
from their duty and allegiance to him. Even then he
attempts further parrying, but at last signs the edict,
though with characteristic sentimental flourishes:

Instead of ink. I’ll write it with my tears.

’Tis done, and now, accursed hand, fall off.

When the lords hurry forth to see that the decree is
enforced, Edward cries in rage (i. iv. 96-103):

Wliy should a king be subject to a priest ?

Proud Rome, that hatchest such imperial grooms.

For these thy superstitious taper-lights,

Wherewith thy antichristian churches blaze.

I’ll fire thy crazed buildings and enforce
The papal towers to kiss the lowly ground.

With slaughter’d priests make Tiber’s channel swell.

And banks rais’d higher with their sepulchres.

This violent anti-Papal outburst is of a piece with
Henry Ill’s tirade in The Massacre,^ and in lines loo-i

* The Massacre^ xi. 16-17.

2 Ibid. xvi. 55-7.

3 Ibid. xxi. 60-71.

i8o THE TROUBLESOME REIGN OF

is verbally almost identical. It comes more appropriately
from a king who has been fatally wounded by a friar than
from one who has been merely cautioned to banish a
minion. But in either case it makes capital out of the
passionate Protestant feeling in the theatre audience.

Edward’s sentimental mood recurs when Gaveston re-
enters to take his leave, and hears from the king’s lips,
^Thou from this land, I from myself am banished’. He
is appointed governor of Ireland and ‘pictures’ are ex-
changed as mementoes. But the queen’s entrance stirs
Edward to a further outburst, ‘Fawn not on me, French
strumpet; get thee gone’, and both he and Gaveston
accuse her of being too familiar with Mortimer. She re-
pudiates the charge, for which no word or action of hers
in the play has hitherto given ground. Indeed Marlowe
skilfully makes the love that she still bears to her husband
the pivot on which Gaveston’s recall from exile is to turn.
The king angrily declares:

There weep, for till my Gaveston be repeal’d,

Assure thyself thou com’st not in my sight.

When, therefore, he departs with the favourite and the
barons enter, Isabel cries (i. iv. 200-3) •

I am enjoin’d

To sue unto you all for his repeal;

This wills my lord, and this must I perform.

Or else be banish’d from his highness’ presence.

Lancaster and Warwick would have Gaveston return
only as ‘a ship-wreck’d body’. When Mortimer asks in
surprise, ‘But madam, would you have us call him home ?’
the queen answers:

Ay, Mortimer, for till he be restor’d.

The angry king hath banish’d me the court;

And therefore, as thou lovest and tendrest me.

Be thou my advocate, unto these peers —

and she takes him aside to give him weighty ‘reasons’ why
he should agree to Gaveston’s recall. This whispered
colloquy marks the beginning of the queen’s amorous

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND i8i

entanglement with Mortimer. It has been seen that every
woman playing a leading part in Marlowe’s plays has two
rivals for her love. Here there is a variant on this theme.
A woman through her husband’s wanton neglect is step
by step urged into the arms of a paramour.

Mortimer’s argument, as the queen’s mouthpiece, to
the still protesting lords is that Gaveston in Ireland will
purchase friends with his store of gold, and will be difficult
to overthrow, while at home he is so detested that it will
be easy to make away with him. Moreover, his banish-
ment and recall will have taught him respect for the
nobility, and should he offend again an armed rising will
be justified (i. iv. 280-1):

For howsoever we have borne it out,

’Tis treason to be up against the king.

Here Marlowe may well have had in mind not only the
lords, who reluctantly yield to Mortimer’s persuasion, but
also Elizabeth’s government, which did not welcome the
presentation of rebellion on the stage.

In his joy at the news of Gaveston’s recall the king
welcomes Isabel in ^a second marriage’, scatters titles and
offices among the lords, and proclaims a tilt and tourna-
ment in honour of the favourite’s return and his coming
marriage to his niece, Mortimer is thus stirred to an out-
burst in singular contrast with his plea of justification for
the favourite’s ‘repeal’. He rails at his fantastically rich
array, on which the national treasure is wasted, and de-
nounces his insolence (i. iv. 415 ff-)«

Whiles others walk below, the king and he
From out a window laugh at such as we,

And flout our train, and jest at our attire.

But whiles I have a sword, a hand, a heart,*

I will not yield to any such upstart.

In Act II the lords are far from politic when they
Haunt in the king’s face ironic ‘devices’ to be borne in

* Cf. The Massacre, ii. 52.

i 82 the troublesome REIGN OF

the tournament that he has proclaimed, and when they
sarcastically salute Gaveston with the titles of his great
offices. He retorts with a Gascon thrust (ii. ii. 74~S):

Base, leaden earls, that glory in your birth,

Go sit at home and eat your tenants’ beef.

Mortimer replies with his sword and is banished from
Court, but before he goes finds fresh cause of offence in
the king’s refusal to ransom his uncle, who has been taken
prisoner by the Scots. He and Lancaster are thus galled
into a stern arraignment (of which the details are not all
historical) of Edward’s misgovernment. It ends with a
mocking reference to his behaviour at Bannockburn (ii. ii.
180-S):

When wert thou in the field with banner spread ?

But once, and then thy soldiers march’d like players,

With garish robes, not armour, and thyself
Bedaub’d with gold rode laughing at the rest.

Nodding and shaking of thy spangled crest,

Where women’s favours hung like labels down.

This is based on Holinshed’s picture of Edward’s invading
army ‘bravely furnished, and gorgeously apparelled, more
seemely for a triumph than meet to encounter with the
cruel enimie in the field’.. But the ‘jig’ with which ‘the
fleering Scots’ celebrated their victory, ‘Maids of England,
sore may you mourn’, seems to have been taken by Mar-
lowe from Fabyan’s Chronicle.

The king takes comfort from these accusations in
grandiose images (ii. ii. 201-3):

Yet shall the crowing of these cockerels
Affright a lion ? Edward, unfold thy paws.

And let their lives’ blood slake thy fury’s hunger.

When Kent, hitherto his unflinching supporter, urges
him to get rid of Gaveston, the king turns on him
angrily: ‘Traitor, begone! whine thou with Mortimer.’
Kent thereupon joins the revolted barons who have laid
siege to Tynemouth Castle where Gaveston, now married
to the king’s niece, ‘frolics’ with him. As the besiegers

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND 183

force tlieir way in the favourite and his bride take ship
to Scarborough, whither the rebels follow by direction of
the queen, who for the first time openly confesses to her-
self her growing love for Mortimer (ii. iv. 59-62) :

So well hast thou deserv’d, sweet Mortimer,

As Isabel could live with thee for ever.

In vain I look for love at Edward’s hand,

Whose eyes are fix’d on none but Gaveston.

Holinshed records in detail what follows: the arrest of
Gaveston by his pursuers, the plea sent by the king to
see him again, the offer of the Earl of Pembroke to con-
duct him safely to and fro, the Earl’s visit by the way to
his own house, and Warwick’s seizure and execution of
the favourite. All this is not easily digestible into dramatic
form, and Marlowe is somewhat overloaded by his mate-
rial, but he introduces vivid touches. When Warwick
after ordering Gaveston to be hanged countermands this
for the ‘honour’ of beheading, the Gascon has at once his
cynical jest ready (ii. v. 29-31):

I thank you all, my lords : then, I perceive.

That heading is one and hanging is the other,

And death is all.

In grimmer vein is Warwick’s last retort before Gaveston
goes to his doom (iii. i. 15-16):

Gav. Treacherous earl, shall I not see the king?

War. The king of heaven perhaps, no other king.

It was unfortunate for Marlowe that the death of
Gaveston was immediately followed in the Chronicle by
prominent mention of the king’s new favourites, the
Spensers, father and son, ‘which were notable instruments
to bring him vnto the liking of all kind of naughtie and
euill rule’. The feud between the king and his foreign
minion and the English barons gave obvious dramatic
opportunities of which Marlowe had made the most,
though they were just beginning to drag in the middle
of the play. But it was impossible to turn to similarly

i 84 the troublesome REIGN OF

effective account the hostility to the Spensers, who were
of like stock with their enemies.

Marlowe, however, shows skill in dealing with this
awkward. dramatic problem. He connects the fortunes of
the earlier and later favourites by making the younger
Spenser a member of the Earl of Gloucester’s household,
where he had won the good graces of Gaveston’s bride,
and had thus been promoted to the royal service. As he
tells his fellow retainer, the Oxonian Baldock, in a scene
which brings a lull into the clash of factions, the way to
rise is to (ii. i. 31 ff.)

cast the scholar off,

And learn to court it like a gentleman

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute.

And now and then stab, as occasion serves.

Baldock assures him that he is merely

curate-like in mine attire.

Though inwardly licentious enough,

And apt for any kind of villainy.

Such a pair are well fitted to make their way rapidly
in the hectic atmosphere of Edward’s court, and Mar-
lowe foreshortens history in order to accelerate Spenser’s
rise to favour. On the news of Gaveston’s execution the
king at once creates him Earl of Gloucester and appoints
him to the vacant office of Lord Chamberlain. But this
does not allow of sufficient display of his evil inffuence
to make plausible the immediate demand of the barons
to the king (iii. ii. 161-3):

That from your royal person you remove
This Spenser, as a putrefying branch.

That deads the royal vine.

Edward’s answer is to embrace the new Lord Chamber-
lain in front of the barons’ herald, with the threat :

hie thee, get thee gone.

Edward with fire and sword follows at thy heels.

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND 185

After the royal victory at Boroughbridge, which is
advanced in the time-scheme of the play, the king takes
vengeance for Gaveston’s death by beheadii^ Warwick
and Lancaster and sending Moxtinier toj^ITower,
though captivity cannot quench his spirit (iii. iii. 71-4):

What, Mortimer ! can ragged stony walls
Immure thy virtue that aspires to heaven ?

No, Edward, England’s scourge, it may not be:
Mortimer’s hope surmounts his fortunes far.

Spenser now shows himself to be not merely a minion.
He seeks to ensure the quiet of the land through the
dispatch of an agent loaded with gold to frustrate the
designs of the queen, who has fled with her young son to
her brother, Philip of Valois. But the aid against her
husband, denied in France, she finds in Flanders, and
joined by Kent and Mortimer, escaped from the Tower,
she prepares to invade England. Edward characteristically
bids them welcome in terms that Juliet uses as she awaits
the coming of her lover (iv. iv, 45-8):

Gallop apace, bright Phoebus, through the sky,

And dusky night, in rusty iron car,

Between you both shorten the time, I pray.

That I may see that most desired day.

Marlowe again seems to have remembered that suc-
cessful rebellion was a delicate subject on a Tudor stage,
for as Isabel lands near Harwich she laments (iv. ii. 4-9)

a heavy case

When force to force is knit, and sword and glaive
In civil broils makes kin and countrymen
Slaughter themselves in others, and their sides
With their own weapons gor’d. But, what’s the help?
Misgoverned kings are cause of all this wrack.

Mortimer, always practical, cuts short her rhetoric:

Nay, madam, if you be a warrior.

You must not grow so passionate in speeches.

i86 THE TROUBLESOME REIGN OF

In the name of the lords he swears fealtjr to prince
Edward, whom, after the king is defeated near Bristol,
the queen proclaims Lord Warden of the realm. This
complete reversal of fortune dumbfounders the Earl of
Kent, who shrinks from physical outrage to the king,
and who realizes that there is guilty love between Isabel
and Mortimer. His question to the queen ‘How will
you deal with Edward in his fall ?’ is followed by a piece
of significant dialogue (iv. v. 41-6):

P, Edw. Tell me, good uncle, what Edward do you mean?

Kent. Nephew, your father! I dare not call him king.

Mart. My lord of Kent, what needs these questions ?

’Tis not in her controlment, nor in ours.

But as the realm and parliament shall please.

So shall your brother be disposed of.

Mortimer’s own ruthless mood is shown when he orders
the elder Spenser, taken prisoner in the battle, to be
beheaded, and sends forth a Welshman, Rice ap Howell,
in pursuit of the ‘rebellious runagates’, as he calls the
King, Spenser, and Baldock, who have escaped from the
stricken field to the Abbey of Neath.

During the greater part of Acts III and IV Marlowe’s
conscientious endeavour to compress a somewhat un-
manageable amount of historical material within re-
stricted dramatic limits had produced an episodic and
overcrowded effect. But from the point where the King
takes refuge in the Abbey the interest becomes concen-
trated on him as the principal figure, and Marlowe’s art
moves steadily onwards to a superb climax. In his down-
fall Edward clings to his passion for making a ‘situation’
put of everything that happens to him. He offers himself
to the Abbot’s compassion as an exemplar of the tragic
fortunes of princes (iv. vi. 12-15):

Stately and proud, in riches and in train.

Whilom I was, powerful, and full of pomp :

But what is he whom rule and empery
Have not in life or death made miserable ?

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND 187

He begs from his companions in woe moralizing
consolations which have no reality for him:

Make trial now of that philosophy

That in our famous nurseries of arts

Thou suckedst from Plato and from Aristotle.

He tries to cheat himself into the belief that he would
find contentment within monastic walls :

Father, this life contemplative is heaven,

O that I might this life in quiet lead !

But we, alas, are chas’d; and you, my friends,

Your lives and my dishonour they pursue.

His fears are at once realized, for his pursuers are guided
to the Abbey and their leader, the Earl of Leicester, as
he catches sight of the king sitting disguised, takes his
turn at moralizing with a Senecan adage (iv. vi. 43 “" 4 ) •

Too true it is. Quern dies vidit veniens superbwn,

Hunc dies vidit fugiens iacentem.

After arresting Spenser and Baldock in the queen’s
name, he tells Edward that he must go to Killingworth.
Again he generalizes and fantasticates the situation (iv, vi.
81 ff.):

K, Edw, Must! ’tis somewhat hard when kings must go.

Leic. Here is a litter ready for your grace.

K. Edw, A litter hast thou? Lay me in a hearse,

And to the gates of hell convey me hence;

Let Pluto’s bells ring out my fatal knell,

And hags howl for my death at Charon’s shore.

When, at Killingworth, Leicester seeks to comfort him
he retorts with another grandiose image (v. i. 8-12):

The griefs of private men are soon allay’d.

But not of kings. The forest deer, being struck,

Runs to an herb that closeth up the wounds;

But, when the imperial lion’s flesh is gor’d.

He rends and tears it with his wrathful paw.

i88 THE TROUBLESOME REIGN OF

But there is a note of real anguish in another, more
exquisite image (v. i. 26-7) :

But what are kings when regiment is gone

But perfect shadows in a sunshine day?

And with Edward’s recital that follows of his own griefs
and humiliations the dramatist begins to excite the revul-
sion of feeling on behalf of the king who had hitherto by
his words and deeds alienated every sympathy. The
Bishop of Winchester presses him to resign the crown to
his son, but he declares that it is Tor Mortimer, not
Edward’s head’ and refuses the demand. At last he forces
himself to submit (v. i. 56-7):

Here, take my crown; the life of Edward too.

Two kings in England cannot reign at once —

only forthwith to retract :

But stay awhile, let me be king till night,

That I may gaze upon this glittering crown.

But he is pressed for an instant answer :

My lord, the parliament must have present news,

And therefore say, will you resign or no ?

Thereupon, in the original stage-direction, The king
rageth’, and cries T’U not resign’. Even in the ‘reluctant
pangs of abdicating royalty’ there is an element of pose,
as Edward alternately gives and takes back the crown, and
when he finally parts with it, sends also to the queen his
handkerchief wet with tears and dried again with sighs.

Yet he has only begun to tread his via dolorosa. He is
now to be surrendered to the Earl of Berkeley, who in
his turn proves too gentle a custodian, and gives place to
Matrevis and Gurney, with orders to move him hither
and thither by night, and by the way (v. ii. 63-5)

Speak curstly to him ; and in any case

Let no man comfort him if he chance to weep.

But amplify his grief with bitter words.

When the king is seen in their custody, Mortimer’s

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND 189

commands are being ruthlessly obeyed. Edward moans
(v. iii. 18-20):

all my senses are annoy’d with stench.

Within a dungeon England’s king is kept,

Where I am starv’d for want of sustenance.

Holinshed mentions the stench, but to emphasize the
king’s humiliation Marlowe here introduces an episode
fgr which Stow is the authority. Edward pleads for water
to cool his thirst :

Mat. Here’s channel water, as our charge, is given ;

Sit down, for we’ll be barbers to your grace.

K. Edw. Traitors, away! What, will you murther me
Or choke your sovereign with puddle water?

Gur. No, but wash your face and shave away your beard,
Lest you be known, and so be rescued.

In effect an abortive attempt at rescue is made by the
Earl of Kent, who is seized and sent to be judged. But
Mortimer realizes that there are other sympathizers with
Edward (v. iv. 1-2):

The king must die, or Mortimer goes down :

The commons now begin to pity him.

He sends a message in equivocal Latin phrasing that
will procure Edward’s death, without making him respon-
sible for it, and he uses as agent Lightborn, a character
of the dramatist’s invention, who has graduated in the
Italian criminal school. As Lightborn speeds on his fateful
mission Mortimer speaks again in the very tones of the
Guise (v. iv. 48-52):

The prince I rule, the queen I do command.

And with a lowly conge to the ground,

The proudest lords salute me as I pass :

I seal, I cancel, I do what I will,

Fear’d am I more than lov’d; let me be fear’d.

He even challenges Fate in the Ovidian line:

Major sum quam cui possit for tuna nocere.'

^ Metamorphoses y vi. 195.

190 THE TROUBLESOME REIGN OF

Immediately after the coronation of prince Edward
as the new king, Mortimer shows that he is master by
ordering Kent, who is brought in a prisoner, to be be-
headed. Neither the young king’s counter-order, ‘he is
my uncle, and shall live’, nor his petition to the Protector
can save Kent from the block. His execution (antedated
in the play by three years) is the prelude to Edward’s last
agony in Berkeley Castle. Lightborn delivers to Matrevis
and Gurney the letter from Mortimer which includes an
order in Latin for his own death after Edward’s murder.
The trio make their preparations for the deed (v. v. 29-

35):

Light, See that in the next room I have a fire,

And get me a spit, and let it be red-hot.

Mat. Very well.

Gut. Need you anything besides .?

Light. What else? A table and a feather-bed.

Gut. That’s all?

Light. Ay, ay; so when I call you, bring it in.

Mat. Fear you not that.

This homely dialogue, fraught with tragic significance,
is a masterpiece of art in its contrast with the imaginative
realism of Edward’s description of his prison, when Light-
born enters it (v. v. 55 ff.):

This dungeon where they keep me is the sink
Wherein the filth of all the castle falls.

And there in mire and puddle have I stood
This ten days’ space; and lest that I should sleep,

One plays continually upon a drum.

They give me bread and water being a king.

His tortures have now robbed Edward’s speech of its
flourishes, save for one last hectic flash:

Tell Isabel, the queen, I look’d not thus.

When for her sake I ran at tilt in France,

And there unhors’d the Duke of Claremont.

It is a final irony that sleep which the king has for ten
days sought in vain should now deliver him to his doom.

EDWARD THE SECOND, KING OF ENGLAND 191

But there is no detailed lingering over the murder itself,
and Lightborn swiftly follows his victim. Mortimer thus
feels secure (v. vi. 13-14):

All tremble at my name, and I fear none;

Let’s see who dare impeach me for his death.

There is, however, one who dares, the young king:

Think not that I am frightened with thy words.

My father ’s murdered through thy treachery,

And thou shalt die.

Gurney has betrayed Mortimer, who, like Barabas and
Guise, finds himself double-crossed and is sentenced to
the terrible death of a traitor. Even in face of this he
takes his leave in words that embody the spirit of all
Marlowe’s supermen (v. vi. 59-66):

Base Fortune, now I see, that in thy wheel
There is a point, to which when men aspire.

They tumble headlong down; that point I touch’d,

And seeing there was no place to mount up higher.

Why should I grieve at my declining fall ?

Farewell, fair queen; weep not for Mortimer,
j That scorns the world, and, as a traveller,

; Goes to discover countries yet unknown.

A last plea for him from the queen is in vain, and she
herself, as a suspected accomplice in the murder of
Edward, is committed (unhistorically) to the Tower. But
like the Queen Mother in The Massacre after the death of
Guise, she has no longer the will to live :

Then come, sweet death, and rid me of this grief.

The exhibition of Mortimer’s head, as an offering by
the young king to his father’s murdered ghost, appealed
to the same spirit in the theatrical audience that in the
next decade was to welcome the entrance of Macduff
with the head of Macbeth. To-day it is the indubitable
proof of Marlowe’s transfiguration of his historical material
into tragic art that such an episode in its crude physical
horror strikes us as incongruous at the close of Edward II
as of Shakespeare’s play.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER XI
I

^Edward //’, ‘ T^he First Part of the Contention
(2 Henry Viy and ^The True Tragedy of
Richard Duke of York (3 Henry Viy

The presence in Edward 11 of a number of parallels with lines in
The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy of Richard
Duke of York and of 2 and 3 Henry VI is an outstanding feature
of the baffling problem of the interrelation of these plays and their
authorship. For the detailed discussion, from very varied stand-
points, of the problem reference should be made to (i) Miss J. Lee,
‘Parts II and III of Henry VI and their Originals’, in Transactions
of the New Shakespeare Society (1875); (2) Tucker Brooke, ‘The
Authorship of 2 and 3 Henry Vl\ in Transactions of the Connecticut
Academy of Arts and Sciences (1912); (3) Peter Alexander, Shake-
speare^s ^Henry VP and ^Richard IIP (1929), with an Introduction
by A. W. Pollard; (4) Sir E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A
Study of Facts and Problems, i (1930); (5) Edward 11 , ed. by H. B.
Charlton and R. D. Waller, pp. 10 If. (1933). In this Appendix
only the main aspects of the subject can be summarized.

On 12 March 1593/4 Thomas Millington entered in the Station-
ers’ Register a play which was published in 1594 quarto as The
First Part of the Contention between the two famous houses of Y ork
and Lancaster. Without further entry Millington published in 1 595
another quarto, The True Tragedy of Richard, Duke of York, and
the death of good King Henry the Sixth ... as it was sundry times
acted by the Right Honourable the Earl of Pembroke his servants.
In 1600 Millington republished both plays in the same form. He
afterwards parted with his rights to Thomas Pavier, who on
19 April 1602 entered both plays as The Whole Contention which
he published in 1619, with continuous signatures with Pericles. In
this edition there were a number of verbal changes and a few
additions, and ‘W. Shakespeare Gent.’ appeared on the title-page
as author. In 1623 the two plays, much enlarged and altered,
especially The Contention, were included in the First Folio entitled
The Second and Third Parts of Henry VI, as sequels to the hitherto
unpublished First Part of Henry VI.

A false start, as is now generally recognized, was given to the

THE CONTENTION AND THE TRUE TRAGEDY 193

problem aroused by these successive publications, by Malone,
through the misinterpretation of a passage in the address to his
fellow playwrights in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, warning them
against actors:*

‘Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our
feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is
as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you : and being
an absolute lohanites fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-
scene in a countrey.’

Malone took the phrase ‘beautified with our feathers’ to mean
that Greene was accusing the ‘upstart’ Shakespeare of plagiarizing
from the plays of himself and his friends. From his parody of the
line,

O tygers hart wrapt in a womans hyde

found both in True Tragedy and 5 Henry VI, i. iv. 137,
Malone inferred that this was one of Shakespeare’s borrowings and
that Greene and one or other of his associates, preferably Marlow'c,
were the originators of the plays which Shakespeare revised into
2 and 3 Henry VI. This view, with modifications, found much
support, and was most fully expounded by Miss J. Lee in the
article mentioned above. 2

But Greene’s phrase, ‘an upstart Crow, beautified with our
feathers’, has to be interpreted in the light of an earlier passage in
his Never too Late (1590), where he rebukes an actor for presump-
tion, though he owes everything to the playwright who has
provided him with words to speak :

‘Why, Roscius, art thou proud with Esops Crow, being pranct with the
glorie of others feathers } of thy selfe thou canst say nothing.’

Greene, therefore, in his Groatsworth of Wit was attacking the
actor, Shakespeare, for daring to compete with his superiors, the
dramatists, in their own field. But he was not making a charge of
plagiarism. This was recognized by Tucker Brooke and has been
pressed home conclusively by Alexander. But with the elimination
of Greene’s supposed claim. Tucker Brooke has championed Mar-
lowe as the author of The Contention and The True Tragedy on
grounds which may be summarized broadly as follows.

Thomas Millington, who entered The Contention on the

* Dissertation on the Three Parts of Henry VI (1787), pp. 19 ff.

^ A summary of it is given in my Shakspere and hts Predecessors,
pp. 540-2.

194 the first part OF THE CONTENTION

Stationers’ Register on 12 March 1593/4, on the following 17 May
entered, with Nicholas Ling, The Jew of Malta, In neither case
was the author’s name given, nor did it appear on the title-page
of The Contention (i 594) or The True Tragedy (i 595). But the latter
play and presumably the former was acted by Pembroke’s company,
for which Marlowe wrote Edward //, and with which Shakespeare
is not known to have been associated. Millington’s 1600 quartos
were also anonymous, and Shakespeare’s name first appears on the
1619 edition of Pavier, who had previously not hesitated to place
it on the title-pages of Sir John Oldcastle (1600) and The Yorkshire
Tragedy (1608).

The literary quality of The Contention and The True Tragedy^
in Brooke’s view, points to Marlowe as being their author. They
exhibit ‘a brilliant synthesis of plot and emotion’, and ‘the whole
tangled story is resolutely pitched in a single key’. Moreover, the
respective relations of Henry VI, Queen Margaret, Suffolk, and
Prince Edward in these two plays are closely akin to those of
Edward II, Queen Isabel, Mortimer, and Prince Edward in Edward
II. The versification, with its predominant number of end-
stopped lines, and its absence of double endings, is characteristic
of Marlowe. But the most concrete support for Marlowe’s claim
is found by Brooke in the remarkable number of passages in The
Contention and The True Tragedy which have parallels in Marlowe’s
accepted plays or which are repeated in the quartos themselves.
Such parallelism and repetition are both characteristic of Mar-
lowe’s technique. Brooke gives a list of twenty-eight parallels with
plays in the recognized Marlovian canon, fourteen of which are
with Edward II and nine with The Massacre at Paris. He gives
also fifteen examples of repetitions within The Contention and The
True Tragedy. He notes fiirther that there are absent from these
plays six additional parallels between Edward II and 2 and 3
Henry VI. Hence he infers that the 1594 ^595 quartos did

not reproduce the full text of the plays as written by Marlowe,
and later revised by Shakespeare. The revision, he holds, took
place before Greene’s death in September 1592, as otherwise his
parody of a line in The True Tragedy loses its pertinence.

The view of The Contention and The True Tragedy as incomplete
versions of the texts on which they are based, which is incidental
in Brooke’s theory, is fundamental in Alexander’s and is developed
to an entirely different conclusion. Alexander holds that the two
plays are ‘bad quartos’ of 2 and 3 Henry V /, and that Shakespeare

AND THE TRUE TRAGEDY 195

alone is the author. He believes that these quartos are not based,
according to an earlier view of some critics, on an imperfect short-
hand transcript taken in the theatre but on a report by the actors
in Pembroke’s company who took the parts of Warwick in The
Contention and The True Tragedy and of his chief interlocutors,
Suffolk in the earlier play and Clifford in the latter, which are
noticeably far closer to the corresponding parts in 2 and 3 Henry
VI than any others, except in some of the prose episodes, including
detailed stage-directions, which, in Alexander’s view, are derived
from a transcript. On the general relation of the quarto and the
folio texts Alexander makes a strong case. But Sir E. K. Chambers,
while adopting his view of this, would substitute the book-keeper
for actors as the reporter and is doubtful about the supplementary
transcript. And A. W. PoUard, another supporter, puts in the
qualification that the inclusion of the plays in the First Folio does
not imply a guarantee by Heminge and Condell that they are the
unaided work of Shakespeare.

The evidence of the Folio is therefore not in itself conclusive
on the question of authorship. Pavier’s ascription of The Contention
and The True Tragedy to Shakespeare in 1619 counts, for reasons
already given, for very little. The strongest external evidence in his
favour, in my opinion, is Greene’s in 1592. His parody of a line in
The True Tragedy, bitterly applied to the upstart actor-dramatist,
would lose, if not all, at any rate most of, its significance if it were
not an example of the blank verse that the upstart had ventured
to bombast out. And there was probably little else of Shakespeare’s
blank verse before September 1592 to gibe at except in these
historical plays.

The strongest internal evidence for Shakespeare’s authorship
lies, as I think, in the Jack Cade scenes. The view that Marlowe
had no humour and could not write prose is no longer tenable.
But, in opposition to Tucker Brooke, I cannot see his hand in
these scenes which are unlike anything in the Marlovian canon and
which are written in exactly the same spirit as Shakespeare always
treats demagogues and their dupes. And though Marlowe has
drawn weak kings in Mycetes, Plenry III of France, and Edward II,
they have a kinship that differentiates them all from the ineffec-
tively saintly Henry VI. Richard, Duke of Gloucester, in The True
Tragedy, is consistent in character (though the attempt has been
made to question this) with Richard III. And the pastoral images
and allusions are foreign to Marlowe’s interest while they fall

196 THE FIRST PART OF THE CONTENTION

naturally from the pen of the young actor-playwright lately come
from Stratford-on-Avon.

On the other hand, on Alexander’s own showing that 7 he
Contention and 7 he 7 rue 7 ragedy are bad quartos of the existing

2 and 3 Henry Vl^ there are, as I think, points that tell in favour
of Marlowe. Chambers has noted that the quartos omit the classical
quotations found in the folio text of the plays. It has been one
of my endeavours in the present study to illustrate the wide-
reaching classical influence on Marlowe. He has, of course, no
monopoly of Latin quotations. But when we find them from
Ennius (2 Henry F/, i. iv. 65), Virgil (2 Henry Vl^ ii. i. 24, and
IV. i. 1 17), Ovid, Heroides {3 Henry VI^ i. iii. 48) it is in accord with
the usual practice of Marlowe and not of Shakespeare. And while
a good many classical allusions are common to the quarto and the
folio texts, many of the most striking are found only in the latter.
Among these are the references to Althea and her son Meleager,
prince of Calydon (2 Henry T/, i. ii. 35-6); Ascanius'and ‘madding
Dido’ (2 Henry VI^ iii. ii. 1 16-18); ‘Ajax Telamonius’ in his
madness killing sheep and oxen (2 Henry VI, v. i. 26-7); and in

3 Henry VI two that are specially noticeable (ii. ii. 146-9) :

Helen of Greece was fairer far than thou.

Although thy husband may be Menelaus,

And ne’er was Agamemnon’s brother wrong’d
By that false woman, as this king by thee.

and (iv. ii. 19-22):

That as Ulysses and stout Diomede

With sleight and manhood stole to Rhesus’ tents

And brought from thence the Thracian fatal steeds.

The mention of Helen together with Menelaus has its counter-
part in one of the greatest passages in Doctor Faustus (v. i. 115 ff.),
and Marlowe’s reiteration of the theme of Helen’s peerless beauty
is elsewhere absent, except in passing reference, from Shakespeare’s
pages. Nor is there in these any other allusion to the exploit con-
cerned with the horses of Rhesus, which is here unconvincingly
dragged in by way of simile, and which was known to Marlowe
from the Amores i. ix. 23-4, and had been introduced also as a
simile, in Dido i. i. 70-4. With 7 he Massacre at Paris, too, 2 and 3
Henry VI are closely related not only through parallel passages
but through the strikingly similar portraiture of the Dukes of Guise
and of York, and their relations to the sovereigns whom they plot
to overthrow.

AND THE TRUE TRAGEDY ,97

These, briefly set forth are the chief conflicting factors of a
problem which is rendered the more difficult because we do not
know the chronological order of the plays. The comparative
relevance to their context of some of the parallel passages suggests
that it is as follows: The Massacre at Paris, 2 and 3 Henry VI,
Edward IL On the assumption of the priority of the two Henry VI
plays to Edward 11 Charlton and Waller have suggested that
Marlowe was influenced by Shakespeare to turn to English history:
‘he forsook his high astounding terms to adopt a new technique.*
But if Shakespeare had written in 1591 or 1592 the two Henry VI
plays more or less as they appear in the First Folio he had himself
played the sedulous ape to Marlowe. And the latter who has been
seen to be at all times a ready borrower would then seem in his
turn to have ‘conveyed’ a number of lines and phrases from the
upstart’s English history plays to his own. On this theory it is not
Shakespeare but Marlowe who turns out to be the plagiarist.
Mutato nomine de te fabula narratur!

On the other hand, Edward 11 may be the earliest of the three
plays. If so, Shakespeare must after all have lifted lines from this
play and from The Massacre, and the charge of plagiarism, scarcely
recognized as an offence in the Elizabethan code, would have to
be revived, not on behalf of Greene or on his testimony, but in
relation to Marlowe on internal evidence alone. Yet again we do
not know what may be due to the book-keeper of the Pembroke
company, or to the respective editors, ‘pirate’ or otherwise.

Every suggested solution seems to me to have its own difficulties.
The only certainty is that 2 and 3 Henry VI, with their ‘bad
quartos’, stand in a peculiarly intimate relation to Edward 11 and
to The Massacre at Paris, and that had Marlowe never written,
they would not be what they are. And whether with Tucker
Brooke we claim The Contention and The True Tragedy for Mar-
lowe, or with Alexander see in them bad quartos of Shakespeare’s
folio 2 and 3 Henry VI, both of these critics, in my opinion, from
their opposing standpoints, exaggerate the literary and dramatic
merits of the texts that they champion as compared with Edward 1 1 .

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER XI
II

Edward //, Arden of Feversham^ and Solyman and
Perseda

Edward II has also a number of parallels with two plays, Arden
of Feversham and Solyman and Perseda^ which for different reasons
have become associated with Thomas Kyd. One line in Edward II y
I. i. 1 5 1, ‘I have my wish in that I joy thy sight’ is repeated exactly
in Arden, v. i. 342 (Temple edition); and Edward II, ii. ii.

30-1,

Is this the love you bear your sovereign ?

Is this the fruit your reconcilement bears ?

is closely echoed in Arden, i. i. 186-7,

Is this the end of all thy solemn oaths ?

Is this the fruit thy reconcilement buds ?

There are other parallels quoted by Charlton and Waller in the
Introduction to their edition of Edward II, pp. 17-18.

Arden of Feversham was entered on the Stationers’ Register on
3 April 1592 to Edward White who published an edition, with a
flamboyant title, in the same year. Another edition by White
followed in 1599, and a third by Elizabeth Allde in 1633. All were
anonymous. The attempt first made in 1770 to claim the play
for Shakespeare by a Faversham antiquary, which found its most
eloquent advocate in Swinburne, needs, in my opinion, no refuta-
tion. Neither in subject-matter nor style does it recall Shakespeare
at any period. A much more plausible claim has been advanced
for Kyd by Fleay, Crawford, Dugdale Sykes, and Tucker Brooke.
His prose tract, Fhe Murder of John Brewen, published in 1592,
shows his interest in a notorious contemporary case closely ana-
logous to that of Thomas Ardern, as the name was really spelt, and
his guilty wife and her lover. But I remain of the opinion stated
in my edition of Kyd’s Works (1901), p. xc, that the palpable
imitation, with a far less harrowing background, of a famous
episode in Fhe Spanish Tragedy (ii. v. 1-4) in Arden, iii. i.
88-80:

Franklin. What dismal outcry calls me from my rest ?

Arden. What hath occasioned such a fearful cry ?

Speak, Michael: hath any injured thee?

ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM ,99

is very unlikely to be from the pen of Kyd who, so far as we can
judge, was not given to repetition. Marlowe, on the other hand,
was a frequent borrower, and he might readily have adapted Kyd’s
lines to his own use, especially at a time when they were in close
contact. And apart from the parallels with Edward //, there are
other passages in Arden that have a distinctively Marlovian stamp.
The invocation, in the A mores ^ i. xiii. 39, to the horses of the night
not to hasten, repeated in his tragic hour by Dr. Faustus, falls
with exquisite tenderness from Arden’s lips, i. i. 60-4:

Sweet love, thou knowest that we two, Ovid-like,

Have chid the morning when it ’gan to peep.

And often wished that dark night’s purblind steeds
Would pull her by the purple mantle back,

And cast her in the Ocean to her love.

And another line in the same elegy of the A mores, translated
freely by Marlowe,

The Moon sleeps with Endymion every day
prompts Alice Arden’s passionate outburst about Mosbie, v. i.

^55-7:

Had chaste Diana kissed him, she like me
Would grow love-sick, and from her watery bower
Fling down Endymion and snatch him up.

The lines in Arden, i. i. 252-5:

For as sharp-witted poets, whose sweet verse
Makes heavenly gods break off their nectar draughts
And lay their ears down to the lowly earth,

Use humble promise to their sacred Muse —

might be a pendant to the passage in i Tamburlaine, v. ii. 98-110,
beginning, ‘If all the pens that ever poets held’.

In very different vein the description of a villain in Arden, ii.
i. 49-54, ending,

His chin was bare, but on his upper lip
A mutchado, which he wound about his ear —

is reminiscent of the description of Pilia-Borza in l^he Jew of
Malta, IV. i. 7-8:

That, when he speaks, draws out his grisly beard,

And winds it twice or thrice about his ear.

And in the speeches of Mosbie and Alice in Act ir. v, there is
that mingling of romantic feeling and classic lucidity of phrase of

200

ARDEN OF FEVERSHAM

which Marlowe is master, and which differs from Kyd’s cloudier
and more sombre interpretation of passion. Marlowe, as we know
from ^he Jew and The Massacre, was keenly interested in the
devices for poisoning employed by Clarke, the painter, as described
by Mosbie in Act i. i. 228 ff. and 610 ff. And what has been seen
to be a constant feature from Dido onwards in Marlowe’s dramatic
technique, the emphasis upon the rivalry of two men for a woman’s
love, is illustrated by the contest between Clarke and Michael for
Susan’s hand, of which there is no hint in Holinshed, as a pendant
to the conflict of passion, of which Alice is the centre, between
Arden and Mosbie.

It is, of course, true that this tragedy of bourgeois domestic life
is on a very different plane from the subjects of Marlowe’s recog-
nized plays. But it has become increasingly clear from recent
investigation that he made as profitable use as was possible of his
reading. When turning over his Holinshed for material for
Edward II he may have been struck with the chronicler’s detailed
account of a cause celebre connected with a Kentish town through
which he had probably passed on his way from Canterbury, where
Alice Ardern had in 1551 been burnt at the stake. If he felt drawn
to dramatize it, Arden of Feversham is the masterpiece that would
result, and I agree with E. H. C. Oliphant* that there is no other
known playwright of the time whose hand can be traced in its
finest flights, not even Kyd, though the villains might owe some-
thing to the creator of Pedringano and Serberine in The Spanish
Tragedy, If Arden is anonymous in all its editions so is Tamburlaine,
But with the domestic tragedy there is no support from contem-
porary references for the authorship of Marlowe or any other
known playwright, and there may have been some unidentified
genius who could bring the touch of Marlowe’s magic into a
dramatic field unvisited by him in any of his accepted works.

Another anonymous play, Solyman and Perseda, entered in the
Stationers’ Register, 20 November 1592, and published by Edward
White in an undated quarto and in another dated 1599 has a
number of parallels with Edward //. Two of the most notable are
Edward //, ii. iv. 296-7;

And when this favour Isabel forgets,

Then let her live abandoned and forlorn.

* Shakespeare and his Fellow Dramatists, pp. 281-2.

SOLYMAN AND PERSEDA 201

Solyman and Perseda, iv. i. 198-9:

My gracious Lord, when Erastus doth forget this favour
Then let him live abandoned and forlorn.

and Edzvard 77 , v. ii. 104-5 :

I tell thee, ’t is not meet that one so false
Should come about the person of a prince.

Solyman and Perseda^ i. v. 71-2:

It is not meet that one so base as thou
Shouldst come about the person of a king.

Other parallels are given by Charlton and Waller in their edition
oi Edward 77 , pp. 18-19.

In my edition of Kyd’s Works, pp. Ivi ff., I have summarized
the evidence in favour of his authorship of Solyman and Perseda^
though this cannot be proved beyond a doubt. In any case the
date of the entry in the Register makes it probable that it was
later than Edward 77 , in which case the author of Solyman and
Perseda would be the borrower.

There are also some notable parallels quoted by Charlton and
Waller (op. cit., pp. 9-10) with Peek’s Edward 1 entered in the
Stationers’ Register, 8 October 1593 and published in the same
year. The dates suggest that Peek, or whoever was responsible
for the corrupt 1593 text, was the borrower. But as Charlton and
Waller point out, one or two of the passages are more approximate
to their context in Edward I than in Marlowe’s play.

D d

44i7

The Tragicall Hiftory
of the Life and Death

of Doctor F A V s T V s.

With nevvaddicions.

Written by Ch. MarUi,

Pi'intcd at London for and m to be foldac his
fliopwithoutl4cwgatc. idiS.

XII

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF
DOCTOR FAUSTUS

T ill comparatively recently it was usual to assign
The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus^ of which the
earliest-known quarto is dated 1604, to the earlier period
of Marlowe’s dramatic career. The academic atmosphere
and echoes, especially in the opening scenes, suggested a
date of composition not long after Marlowe had left Cam-
bridge. In a number of passages there is kinship in thought
and style with the Tamburlaine plays, and there are links
with Dido and the A mores, A date within 1588-9 was
therefore widely accepted and was thought to be supported
by the entry in the Stationers’ Register on 28 February
1 588/9 of ^ Ballad of the life and death of Doctor Faustus^ and
by the performance, not as a new play, of Greene’s Friar
Bacon and Friar Bungay^ recorded by Henslowe on 19
February 1 591/2. But nothing is known of the origin or
contents of the ballad, and Sir A. W. Ward’s view that
Greene’s play was written to rival the success of Doctor
Faustus^ is merely a speculation.

It now seems highly probable on bibliographical grounds
that Doctor Faustus cannot be dated earlier than 1592.
The ultimate source of the play is the German Historia von
D, Johann Fans ten, published at Frankfurt-on-the-Main in
1587, and reissued with additional chapters in the same
year, in 1589, 1590, 1592, and 1599. But Marlowe probably
did not know German, and his practice of close adherence
to the text of his sources proves beyond doubt that he based
his play not on any edition of the original Historia but on
an English translation by an unidentified T. F.’, of which
the earliest extant edition has the following title-page :
The I HISTORIE | of the damnable ( life and dcserued death

* See pp. xxi— xxii of his edition of Doctor Faustus and Friar Bacon and
Friar Bungay (1901).

204 THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

As this edition was newly imprinted and amended it
was not the first and it was possible to assume that there
was an earlier one which Marlowe could have used from
about 1588 onwards. But an entry on 18 December 1592
in Register B of the Stationers’ Company, first made
public in 1930,^ shows that after Orwin’s publication of
P. F.’s translation, Abel Jeffes asserted that he had a prior
right based on a claim made in or about the preceding
May. This claim he appears to have made good. As it
did not rest on an entry in the Register, it apparently
depended on a publication of the translation in or about
May. This would seem to have been the first printing of
P. F.’s version, for Orwin, who had procured his manu-
script from Richard Olive, did not make a counter-claim
on a previous publication. Unless, therefore, we make
the purely arbitrary assumption that Marlowe had access
to a manuscript of the translation, it seems that his play
I must be later than May 1592.^

In any case, no entry of it was made during the six-
teenth century in the Register, and paradoxically about
fourteen lines of it, together with some thirty from
Fambuflaine, Parts I and II, were printed for the first
time, so far as we know, with modifications, in 1594 in the
anonymous Pembroke company’s piece, Fhe Faming of a
Shrew, It was not till 7 January 1600/1 that Thomas
Bushell entered A booke called the plaie of Doctor Faustus,
Even then he brought out no edition (unless one has

* Records of the Courts of the Stationers* Company y i$^6 to 1602, from
Register By ed. by W. W. Greg and E. Boswell, p. 44.

* See W. W. Greg’s note on pp. 7-8 of the introduction to Doctor
Faustusy ed. F. S. Boas (1932).

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS 205

totally disappeared) till the quarto of 1604, represented
by one surviving copy in the Bodleian, with a title-page
as follows:

This edition was reprinted with minor variants in 1609
and 1611 after the copyright had passed to John Wright.
Then in 1616, without a prefatory word or even an
announcement on the title-page, Wright brought out a
radically altered edition of which only one copy is extant
in the British Museum. To the approximately 1,500 lines
of the 1604 quarto about 550 were now added, including
some entirely new or considerably expanded scenes. And
even in those that run parallel there are so many textual
variants that it is evident that Wright was not basing this
1616 edition on any of the earlier quartos but on an inde-
pendent manuscript. The long additions to the scenes at
the Papal Court (Act iii. i. 55 ff. and ii. 1-93), the new
scenes (Act iv. i, iii, iv, and the additional matter in ii) at
or near the Emperor’s Court, and the inserted dialogues
in Act V. ii between the fiends and between the good and
bad angels are all clearly not from Marlowe’s pen. Light
on their 'provenance is thrown by an entry in Henslowe’s
Diary, 22 November 1602, of a payment of to William
Birde and Samuel Rowley ‘for their adicyones in doctor
Fostes’. This has been supported by the investigations
of H. Dugdale Sykes ^ and others, especially in respect of
Rowley. The episodes at the Papal and Imperial Courts
in the 1616 version are strikingly akin in treatment and
in versification to scenes in Rowley’s When Ton See
Me Ton Know Me,^ The additions evidently hit the
taste of the time for Doctor Faustus in its revised form

* The Authorship of 'The Taming of A Shrew\ 'The Famous Victories
of Henry and the Additions to Marlowe* s 'Faustus* (1920).

^ Doctor Faustus, ed. Boas, pp. 29-30.

206 THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS
was reissued by Wright in 1619, 1620, 1624, 1628,* and

^^ 33 - . . . . , .

By the majority of modern editors of the play, including
Sir A. W. Ward, A. H. BuUen, and Tucker Brooke, the
1616 text has been treated as throughout inferior to that
of 1604 because of its later date and its inclusion of scenes
not from Marlowe’s hands. They did not take account of
the fact that the quotations from Doctor Faustus in the 1 594
Fhe Faming of a Shrew are considerably closer to the 1 616
than the i 6 o\ version. Recent examination of the 1616
quarto in relation to P. F.’s translation of the German
Historia has vindicated its claim to give on the balance
a better text than the 1604 quarto, so far as they run
parallel, especially in Acts I-IV.

In Act III the opening chorus contains thirteen lines,
beginning:

He views the clouds, the planets and the stars

which the English Faust Book (as P. F.’s translation may
be called) shows to be a necessary part of this prologue
and which are omitted in 1604. Some other omitted lines
and a large number of preferable readings are preserved
in the 1616 quarto.^ In the comic scenes common to both
versions this quarto presents a demonstrably superior text
without a number of the 1604 corruptions. ^ On the other
hand, the 1604 quarto retains some lines which were
omitted in 1616 apparently for fear of the Censor’s ban,
and it has the superior rendering of Faustus’s great final
monologue.

Thus to reconstruct, as far as may be, the original play
recourse must be had to both the 1604 and 1616 texts,
with the omission, of course, of the additions by Birde

* Two copies of this hitherto unknown edition recently came to light
in Lincoln College, Oxford, and the Royal Library, Stockholm.

^ For details, see Doctor Faustus, ed. Boas, pp. 22-6.

^ On these corruptions, see P. Simpson’s ‘The 1604 Text of
Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” ’ in Eng, Assoc. Essays and Studies, vol. vii
(1921).

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS 207

and Samuel Rowley. This abnormally short version with-
out any indications of act or scene division, must present
Doctor Faustus in mutilated form. Yet the loss that we
have thus suffered may well have been exaggerated.
Speeches have doubtless been cut and some episodes may
have disappeared entirely. But as in the case of The
Massacre at Paris a close comparison of Doctor Faustus with
its source suggests that when corruptions and additions
are removed, the main lines of Marlowe’s presentation of »
his theme are preserved. There seems to me to be
nothing vital to this presentation which is found in
the English Faust Book and which is missing from the
play. Its structural deficiencies have been unduly em-
phasized by the practice of most modern editors of
dividing it merely into scenes though, in spite of its
comparative brevity, it falls naturally enough into the
usual five Acts.

In any case the play, as it has come down to us, what-
ever its imperfections, shows that in the English Faust
Book Marlowe found a subject fitted above all others to
his distinctive genius. And, paradoxically enough, it was
fortunate that he made the acquaintance of the legend
in this translation and not in the original Historia von
D, Johann Fausten, For the German Historia was written
avowedly as an awful example of the terrible fate that
befeU any one who to gratify his unlawful desires sold
himself to the devil. Yet writing under Renaissance in-
fluences the anonymous author could not help endowing
his Doctor Faustus with something of humanist intellec-
tual ardour.

This feature became much more prominent in P. F.’s
English version, together with a more subdued presenta-
tion of the Doctor’s sins and vices. It is in this version,
and there only, that Marlowe could find the statement
that Faustus at Padua ‘entred his name into the Vni-
uersitie of the Germane nation, and wrote himself Doctor
Faustus^ the vnsatiable Speculator’. Could any two words
have more aptly fitted not only the wandering scholar,

208 THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

but the playwright, who had cried through the lips of
Tamburlaine:

Our souls whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering planet’s course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite.

And always moving as the restless spheres,

Will us to wear ourselves and never rest.

And in more specific ways Marlowe must have recog-
nized in Faustus his own counterpart. The Canterbury
boy through the bounty of Archbishop Parker had
reached Cambridge to qualify himself there for the clerical
career. His studies had earned him the Bachelor’s and
Master’s degrees, but he had turned his back on the
Church, and on arrival in London had gained a reputation
for atheism. Similarly, Faustus through the bounty of a
rich uncle had been sent to Wittenberg to study divinity,
and had obtained with credit his doctorate in the subject.
But his interests lay elsewhere, and he had turned secretly
to the study of necromancy and conjuration.

The opening scene in which Faustus takes one by one
the chief subjects of the academic curriculum, philosophy,
medicine, law, and divinity, and rejects them as insuffi-
cient is, however, not directly suggested by the English
Faust Book but, as the use of Cambridge technical terms
helps to show, by Marlowe’s own studies at Corpus Christi
in connexion wherewith some lines from the scene have
been quoted and discussed.* In comparison with the
orthodox curriculum

These metaphysics of magicians
And necromantic books are heavenly.

By them as Marlowe’s own speculative faculty and
Harriot’s precepts may have led him to believe, more
could be effected than by Tamburlaine’s conquering arms,
or the gold of Barabas, or the statecraft of the Guise.

* See above, pp. 16-17.

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS 209

The power that they conferred was universal and illimit-
able:

( f ^ Emperors and Kings

Are but obey’d in their several provinces
Nor can they raise the wind, or rend the clouds;

But his dominion that exceeds in this,

Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man:

A sound magician is a demi-god.

Thus when by the exercise of incantations at night
Faustus has raised Mephistophilis, who asks what he would
have him do, the Doctor assumes totalitarian authority
(i. iii. 38-41):

I charge thee wait upon me whilst I live,

To do whatever Faustus shall command,

Be it to make the moon drop from her sphere,

Or the ocean to overwhelm the world.

But Mephistophilis is himself merely the servant of the
arch-fiend, Lucifer, concerning whom Faustus now
questions him. In the English Faust Book the passage
runs :

Here Faustus said: but how came thy Lord and Master Lucifer
to haue so great a fal from heauen ?

Mephistofhiles answered: My Lord Lucifer was a faire Angcll
created of God as immortal, and being placed in the Scraphins,
which are aboue the Cherubins, he would haue presumed vnto the
Throne of God with intent to haue thrust God out of his seate.
Vpon this presumption the Lord cast him downe headlong, and
where before he was an Angel of light, now dwels hec in darkenes.

Marlowe^s genius for transfiguring his material , while
keeping faithful to it, made superb use ot the opportunity
presented to it here (i. iii. 65-82):

Faust, Tell me what is that Lucifer thy lord ?

Meph. Arch-regent and commander of all spirits.

Faust. Was not that Lucifer an angel once ?

Meph. Yes, Faustus, and most dearly lov’d of God.

Faust. How comes it then that he is prince of devils ?
Meph. O, by aspiring pride and insolence :

For which God threw him from the face of heaven.
Faust. And what are you that live with Lucifer?

E e

4427

210 THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

Meph, Unhappy spirits that fell with Lucifer,

Conspir’d against our God with Lucifer,

And are for ever damn’d with Lucifer.

FausU Where are you damn’d?

Meph, f In hell.

Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.

Think’st thou that I, that saw the face of God,

/ And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells.

^In being depriv’d of everlasting bliss?

Here the ‘atheist’ Marlowe’s presentation of hcH is far|
more spiritual than that of the Puritan Milton in the
next century. But the agonized accents of the fallen
angel have no power to move Faustus:

What, is great Mephistophilis so passionate
For being deprived of the joys of heaven?

Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude, w
And scorn those joys^hou never shalt possess. ' •

The Doctor is ready to sell his soul to Lucifer so he
may live twenty-four years in all voluptuousness, with
Mephistophilis at his commandment. The effective
dramatic episodes in Act ii. i, when Faustus signs the
bond in due legal form at night with his own blood,
which congeals and has to be melted with a chafer of fire,
and when he disregards the warning inscription that
suddenly appears on his arm. Homo fuge — ^these are closely
based on the English Faust Book. In this source, too, Faustus
thereafter returns to the quest of what heU is, and is told
that ‘wee Diuels know not what substance it is of, but a
confused thing . . . but to bee short with thee, Faustus,
we know that hell hath neither bottome nor end’. Here
again Marlowe spiritualizes what he borrows (ii. i. 122-7) •

Meph. Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib’d

In one self place, but where we are is hell,!

And where heU is, there must we ever be : *

And to be short, when all the world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified.

All places shall be hell that is not heaven.

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS 211

It is because Faustus, so far as appears in the play,
spends his time with Mephistophilis chiefly in such dis-
cussions and in the disputation in academical fashion on
'divine astrology' in Act ii. ii. 33-67, rather than in all
voluptuousness, that there is a sense of unreality in the
Doctor's periodical outbursts of repentance and in the
rival admonitions of the good and bad angels, a legacy
from medieval drama that fits awkwardly into the
Marlovian technique. And there is another echo of
medievalism when Faustus violates his bond by calling
upon his saviour, Christ, and when Lucifer, with his
attendant devils, appears to rebuke him and, after his
promise not to think henceforth on God, to divert him
with the pageant of the seven deadly sins.

Intermingled with the main action of these first two
acts are scenes forming mpjr.e or less a parallel comic under-
gl^ot. In Act I. ii and iv the chief figure is the Doctor's
servant, Wagner, who has been taken over from the
English Faust Book. In his talk with the two scholars and
afterwards with the clown he uses Latin tags which would
drop naturally from Marlowe's pen. And the agreement
in I. iv, by which the clown is to become his man and
serve him for seven years parodies the contract by which
Mephistophilis is to wait upon Faustus for twenty-four
years.

There is no other comic scene till ii. iii, where Wagner
and the Clown have dropped out and their places have
been taken by two characters unknown to the English
Faust Booky Robin and Dick.^ This change seems to
indicate another hand than Marlowe’s, and the frequent
use of phrases which are found also in the Additions pre-
sumably from Samuel Rowley's pen suggests that he may
have possibly contributed to the play in its original form.^
In any case in this scene and in iii. iii the idea of a
burlesque underplot is continued. Robin has got hold of
one of the Doctor's conjuring books, from which he reads

^ He is so called in the 1616 quarto. In the 1604 quarto the name is
Ralph. ^ See further Doctor Faustus, ed. Boas, pp.

212 THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

a mock incantation. At the second reading of it in in. iii,
to escape the hands of a vintner whose cup thev have
stolen, Mephistophilis unexpectedly appears and turns
Robin into an ape and Dick into a dog.

Mephistophilis announces angrily that he has been
summoned from Constantinople by these villains’ charms,
and that he must fly back forthwith ‘unto my Faustus at
the Great Turk’s Court’. But in neither version of the
play is there any other reference to such a visit. The
Court at which Faustus, after a tour in a dragon-drawn
chariot of the stellar universe, and a more circumscribed
terrestrial ride on a dragon’s back, first gives a display of
his magic art is that of the Pope in Act iii. i and ii. The
episode, without the lengthy, pseudo-historical additions
of i6i6, closely follows the account in the English Faust
Book. The childish tricks played upon the Pope at a
banquet by the invisible conjurer and his ministering
spirit seem to us equally unworthy of Faustus and the
august victim of his practical jokes. And the solemn
cursing by Friars, with the bell, book, and candle used in
the office of excommunication, of the supposed offending
‘ghost’ seems an ironic comment on the view attributed
to Marlowe by Baines that if there is ‘anie good Religion
then it is the Papistes, because the service of God is
performed with more ceremonies, as elevation of the
masse, organs, singing men, shaven crowns, &c.’ But the
episode is probably one where Marlowe has been content
merely to follow his source and from which no implication
as to nis opinions is to be drawn.

The English Faust Book served him better in its account
of the Doctor’s visit to the imperial court of Carolus the
Fifth. The mention of one of the great figures of Greece
or Rome always struck a responsive chord in Marlowe’s
breast. In F amhurlaine^ Part II, v. i. 69-70, he had spoken
of ‘great Alexander’ as one of the potentates who had
ridden in triumph through Babylon. Now he fastened
eagerly on the passage in P. F.’s narrativew hich tells how
the Emperor Carolus desired that Faustus should show

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS 213

him that ‘great and mighty monarch of the worlde’, who
‘was such a lanterne & spectacle to all his successors’, to-
gether with his paramour. In lines closely based on P. F.’s
prose, yet fraught with Marlovian music, the Emperor
thus makes his request in Act iv. ii. 19 flF.:

Then, Doctor Faustus, mark what I shall say.

As I was sometimes solitary set
Within my closet, sundry thoughts arose
About the honour of mine ancestors.

Amongst which kings is Alexander the Great,

Chief spectacle of the world’s pre-eminence.

The bright shining of whose glorious acts
Lightens the world with his reflecting beams ;

As when I hear but mention made of him
It grieves my soul I never saw the man.

If, therefore, thou by cunning of thine art,

Canst raise this man from hollow vaults below,

Where lies entomb’d this famous conqueror.

And bring with him his beauteous paramour

Thou shalt both satisfy my just desire,

And give me cause to praise thee while I live.

The Emperor’s wish is gratified and it is a disconcert-
ingly sudden change from this majestic vision to the
jocular episode, also taken from the English Faust Book^
wherein the Doctor revenges himself upon a knight of
the Court, who had doubted his magical art, by making
horns sprout upon his head. Coming from the same source
and belonging to a similar order of conjuring feats are the
tricks that Faustus plays upon the horse-courser (iv. v)
and the exhibition of his art at the Court of the Duke of
Anholt (iv, vii). But for a credulous Elizabethan audience
that took seriously the exercise of sorcery such scenes must
have had a far greater significance than for us to-day.
And now and again, though incongruously with their im-
mediate setting, come confessions from Faustus that he
is not unmindful of the doom to which he is ever drawing

214 THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

nearer. Thus he leaves the Emperor’s Court with the
cry:

Now, Mephistophilis, the restless course

That time doth run with calm and silent foot

Shortening my days and thread of vital life

Calls for the payment of my latest years.

And in the middle of his fooling with the horse-courser
he is arrested by agonizing thoughts from which he seeks
relief in slumber :

What art thou, Faustus, but a man condemn’d to die.?

Thy fatal time doth draw to final end ;

Despair doth drive distrust unto my thoughts :

Confound these passions with a quiet sleep :

Tush, Christ did call the thief upon the Cross;

Then rest thee, Faustus, quiet in conceit.

In Act V the awful end is at hand. The Doctor has
made his will and again is seeking to distract his thoughts,
not in sleep but in festive ‘belly-cheer’ with his friends
among the scholars of Wittenberg. And here once more
the English Faust Book offered Marlowe a golden oppor-
tunity. Of all the figures of the ancient world that had
captured his imagination Helen of Troy stood foremost.
She was the paragon of loveliness and charm by whom all
other women — a Dido or a Zenocrate, were to be measured.
What a joy, therefore, it must have been to the dramatist
to find one of the Wittenberg scholars declaring that he
‘neuer was so desirous of any thing in this world as to haue
a sight (if it were possible) of fayre Helena of Greece, for
whom the worthy towne of Troie was destroyed’, and
Faustus replying that he would bring her into their presence
personally, ‘and in the same forme of attyre as she vsed to
go when she was in her cheefest flowre and pleasauntest
prime of youth’. P. F.’s phrases have a charm of their own,
but again Marlowe’s pen adds a new magic (v. i. 21-4):

You shall behold that peerless dame of Greece,

No otherwise for pomp or majesty,

Than when Sir Paris cross’d the seas with her,

And brought the spoils to rich Dardania.

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS 215

And when Helen passes over the stage before their eyes the
scholars vie with one another in outbursts of lyrical ecstasy :

2. SchoL Was this fair Helen, whose admired work

Made Greece with ten years’ wars afflict poor Troy?
^00 simple is my wit to tell her praise,
yVhom all the world admires for majesty.

Schol, No marvel though the angry Greeks pursued
With ten years’ war the rape of such a queen.

Whose heavenly beauty passeth all compare.

I. Schol. Now we have seen the pride of Nature’s work.

And only paragon of excellence,

We’ll take our leaves; and for this glorious deed
Happy and blest be Faust us evermore!

But Faustus does not think himself ‘happy and blest’
by a momentary vision of Helen. The English Faust Book
tells how he bade Mephistophilis bring her to him and
how he ‘made her his common concubine and bedfellow’.
So in the play (v. i. 100-4) he craves

That I may have unto my paramour
That heavenly Helen which I saw of late
Whose sweet embraces may extinguish clean
/Those thoughts that do dissuade me from my vow,

> I And keep my oath I made to Lucifer.

And when she again appears companioned by two
Cupids his rapturous greeting echoes some of the loveliest
lines in Dido and T amburlaine :

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships.

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium ?

Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss —

Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies.

But nowhere in his plays, not even here, does Marlowe
dwell on the merely sensual side of sex relationships. He
apostrophizes Helen in the diction of medieval chivalry:
I will be Paris, and for love of thee.

Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack’d ;

And I will combat with weak Menelaus,

And wear thy colours on my plumed crest,

Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel.

And then return to Helen for a kiss.

2i6 the tragical HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

And he etherializes her in cosmic and mythological
similitudes till one is tempted to cry,

Was ever woman in this humour wooed?

Had Marlowe vouchsafed us a sight of Faustus in his
sinful pleasures it would have been a fitter prelude to his
fast approaching doom. Goethe two centuries later was
wiser in his generation when he exhibited his Faust as
the seducer of the simple maiden, Gretchen.^

Another attitude of Marlowe’s Faustus that makes his
iniquity more difficult to realize is the affectionate relation
till the end between him and his scholar-friends. For this
the English Faust Book gave the cue, but the dramatist
must have been thinking of those who shared the same
room with him at Corpus Christi College, when Faustus
addresses one of the scholars as ‘my sweet chamber-
fellow’. It is the scholars who are his companions on his
last night, and who seek to comfort him when Faustus
agonizes over his sin and its inevitable penalty in accents
where Marlowe’s prose for once rivals in effect his finest
verse (v. ii. 39-52):

a. SchoL Yet Faustus, look up to heaven; remember God’s
mercies are infinite.

Faust. But Faustus’ offence can ne’er be pardoned; the serpent
that tempted Eve may be saved, but not Faustus. . . . O would
I had never seen Wittenberg, never read book! and what wonders
I have done, all Germany can witness, yea, all the world ; for which
Faustus hath lost both Germany and the world; yea, heaven
itself, heaven, the seat of God, the throne of the blessed, the
Kingdom of joy; and must remain in hell for ever — hell, oh, hell
for ever.

Even in his anguished expectation of the coming of the
fiends, he thinks of his friends’ safety. ‘Gentlemen, away,
lest you perish with me.’ They may pray for him in the
next room, but ‘what noise soever you hear, come not
unto me, for nothing can rescue me’. So one hour before
midnight, Faustus is left to face his awful destiny alone.

* On the relation between Marlowe^e >and Goethe’s treatment of the
Faustus story see Doctor Faustus, ed. BtjJgsJjp. 45-6.

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS 217

In all Marlowe’s plays the death-scenes are specially
memorable. Dido, with Virgil’s words on her lips, flinging
herself into the flames; Tamburlaine gazing before his
eyes close for ever on Zenocrate’s hearse and on the son
whom he has crowned as his heir; Barabas with his last
breath hurling curses from the burning cauldron upon his
enemies; the murdered Guise crying ‘Vive la messe\
perish the Huguenots’; Edward II pleading in vain for his
life to the assassins in the vaults of Berkeley Castle — all
these are haunting figures. But here Marlowe had to deal
with the yet more tremendous situation of a man conscious
that by his own will he is on the very brink of eternal
damnation. His lamentations, in P. F.’s prose, though on
conventional lines, have a poignant ring:

‘Ah, Faustus, thou sorrowful and wofull man, now must thou
go to the damned company in vnquenchable fire, whereas thou
mightest haue had the joyfull immortalitie of the soule, the which
thou hast now lost. . . . Ah grievous paynes that peajce my parting
heart, whom is there now that can deliuer me? Would God that
I knew where to hide me, or into what place to creepe or flic.
Ah, woe, woe is me, be where I will, yet am I taken. Now thou
Fanstus^ damned wretch, howe happy wert thou if as an vn-
reasonable beast thou mightest die without soule, so shouldest
thou not feele any more doubts? But now the diuell will take thee
away both body and soule, and set thee in an vnspeakable place of
darknesse.’

Never did Marlowe’s genius for both keeping true to
his source and gloriously transfiguring it display itself
more irresistibly than in the last-hour soliloquy that he
built on the foundation provided in the English Faust
Book, Never did he employ to such moving effect his
passionate cosmic interest as when he makes Faustus cry
(v. ii. 140-5):

Stand still you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day.

That Faustus may repent and save his soul.

F f

4427

2i8 the tragical HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS

And never did his classical ardour leap into such
startlingly miraculous flame as when he puts into the lips
of the doomed Faust us the invocation of the poet of the
Amores as he lay with Corinna by his side,

O lente, lente currite^ noctis equi!

Then with the swift transition, in which to the Renais-
sance dramatist there was nothing incongruous, comes the
/I cry of the sinner whom the Crucified had died to save:

O, ril leap up to my God! — ^Who pulls me down? —

See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament !

One drop would save my soul, half a drop ; ah, my Christ I
Ah rend not my heart for naming of my Christ 1
Yet will I call on him: O spare me, Lucifer!

Then he turns again to Nature, prays to the hills to fall
and cover him, to the earth to gape and harbour him, to
the stars of his nativity to draw him up into the clouds.
As the clock strikes the half-hour, the thought of the
eternity of his damnation forces from him the agonized
outburst:

Let Faustus live in hell a thousand years,

A hundred thousand, and at last be sav’d,

O, no end is limited to damned souls.

And the contrast between himself, with the fatal dower
of immortality, and the beasts that perish finds voice in
a last wistful recall of classical lore:

Ah, Pythagoras’ metempsychosis were that true.

This soul should fly from me, and I be changed
Into some brutish beast!

But the midnight hour strikes that ends the twenty-four
allotted years. The devils come to claim their victim, and
he vanishes with the despairing cry, ‘PH burn my books’.
So, some twenty years later, another magician, Prospero,
abjures the practice of his art with the declaration, ‘I’ll
drown my book’. Look on this picture and on that!

Yet, with all the horror of the closing scene, of the two
tragic purgative emotions, pity and fear, it is the former
that has the chief mastery over us at the end. It is the

THE TRAGICAL HISTORY OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS 219

note of pity that is heard in the three first lines of the
Epilogue:

Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,

And burned is Apollo’s laurel-bough,

That sometimes grew within this learned man.

If these lines were written by Marlowe they have the
ring of unconscious prophecy. Among the playwrights of
his day he was noted for his learning which was reverenced
even beyond the circle of his friends.^ Apollo’s laurel-
bough that grew within him seemed destined to put forth
many a new and brave shoot. But within about a year
(if the play has been rightly dated above) Marlowe lay
dead in Deptford, and for him, as for his Faustus, the
branch was cut for ever.

^ Chettle, while disclaiming any desire for his acquaintance, says that he
reverences his learning (see below, p. 240).

XIII

MARLOWE’S POEMS

THE SHORTER PIECES

W ITH the lyrical and descriptive elements in Mar-
lowe’s genius it would not have been surprising if
even in his short career he had left behind him a body of
original poetic achievement outside of the dramatic
sphere. But his one notable legacy of this kind is the un-
finished Hero and Leander, Unlike Lyly before him and
Shakespeare and Jonson after him, he did not write songs
to fit aptly into the action of his plays. The one lyric that
we can identify from his pen is more notable for its
associations than its content, though it has its own silvery
charm. It is the set of four-lined stanzas entitled The
Passionate Shefherd to his Love^ beginning:

Come, live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That valleys, groves, hills, and fields
Woods, or steepy mountains yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks.

Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers and a kirtle,

Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle.

With three other stanzas these are printed in the
anthology, England's Helicon (1600), with the signature,
Chr. Marlow. The first three stanzas (with some variants)
and one of the others had already appeared, without title
or signature, in The Passionate Pilgrim ( 1599 ).
volume bore Shakespeare’s name on the title-page, but it
was a miscellaneous collection, and Marlowe’s stanzas

THE SHORTER PIECES 221

were included in the second part, which had a separate
title, Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music. But though not
written by Shakespeare, they were certainly known to him,
for he makes Sir Hugh Evans in 7 he Merry Wives of
Windsor^ iii. i, sing some of the lines in a maudlin mood,
when he has ‘a great dispositions to cry’ — scarcely a
compliment to the ‘dead shepherd’. Did the Welsh
parson use the musical setting included in William
Corkine’s Second Book of Ayres (1612) ?

More of a compliment, though a left-handed one, was
paid by Raleigh when he wrote a Reply to the shepherd’s
invitation in the same metre and in answering phrases.
Its cynical burden is the swift passing of all pleasure and
beauty, wherefore the loved one will not lend an car:

But could youth last, and love still breed;

Had joys no date, nor age no need;

Then those delights my mind might move
To live w^ith thee and be thy love.

The Reply was printed, together with Marlowe’s poem,
in England's Helicon. They were both published together
in a broadside, preserved in The Roxburghe Ballads (i. 205),
printed by the assigns of Thomas Symcock, between
1618 and 1629, In a commonplace book kept by John
Thornborough (1551-1641), successively Dean of York
and Bishop of Worcester, there is an additional ante-
penultimate stanza which in modernized spelling runs :
Thy dishes shall be filled with meat
Such as the gods do use to eat:

Shall one and every table be
Prepared each day for thee and me.

This might have been looked on as an interpolation had
not Izaak Walton, who introduces the poem into The
Compleat Angler (1653 and 1655), added a similar stanza
in the second edition:

Thy silver dishes for thy meat
As precious as the gods do eat.

Shall on an ivory table be
Prepar’d each day for thee and me.

222 MARLOWE’S POEMS

Walton puts it into the lips of a milkmaid, as ^that
smooth song which was made by Kit Marlowe, now at
least fifty years ago’. It certainly comes much more
suitably from a milkmaid than from Ithamore in The Jew
of Malta who in iv. iv. 104-5 ends a highly coloured
invocation to Bellamira with the couplet :

Thou in those groves by Dis above,

Shalt live with me and be my love.

The nearest parallels to the song in Marlowe’s plays are
to be found in Dido^ especially in the Nurse’s invitation
to Cupid (iv. V. 4-12). But pastoralism does not sit easy
on Marlowe. Coral clasps and amber studs, silver dishes
and an ivory table mingle strangely with the simple joys
of the country-side.

There is something of the same blending of diverse
features in the tantalizing fragment, subscribed ‘Ch.
Marlowe’, included in another 1600 anthology, England's
Parnassus, The fragment has no separate title, but is
included in the section headed ‘Description of Seas,
Waters, Rivers, &c.’ It consists of two full stanzas in
ottava ritna^ preceded by the four last lines of a stanza
and followed by the first four lines of another. Short as
it is, this specimen serves to show that Marlowe could
handle the elaborate rhyme scheme of the poem with
easy mastery. And it is marked by his characteristic bold-
ness of imagery and wealth of colour. The poet is walking
beside ‘a stream for pureness rare’ and feasts his eyes upon

the glorious prey

That in the pebble-paved channel lay.

There ran

Nature’s richest alchemy.

Diamonds resolv’d, and substance more divine
Through whose bright gliding current might appear
A thousand naked nymphs, whose ivory shine.
Enamelling the banks, made them more dear
Than ever was that glorious palace gate
Where the day-shining sun in triumph sate.

THE SHORTER PIECES 223

The comparison with the sun’s palace gate is in the true
Marlovian vein as, in different wise, is the similitude in the
next stanza of the trees overarching the stream to ‘a
costly valance o’er a bed’. And the striking expression of
the poet’s sense of form and colour in the last lines of the
fragment.

Their leaves that differed both in shape and show,
(Though all were green), yet difference such in green.
Like to the checker’d bent of Iris’ bow,

Prided the running main as it had been —

deepens our sense of loss in the disappearance of the rest
of the poem.

The recent fresh evidence in support of Marlowe’s
authorship of the Latin elegy on Sir Roger Manwood^
and the prose dedication of Thomas Watson’s Amintae
Gaudia^ may warn us against rejecting too summarily
other pieces that have been attributed to him. An
anonymous contributor to Notes and Queries s 18 May
1850, claimed to have a later sixteenth-century manu-
script which had among its contents an eclogue. Amor
Constans^ beginning ‘For shame, man, wilt thou never
leave this sorrow’, and signed ‘Infortunatus Ch. M.’
This was followed by sixteen sonnets, including two
addressed to a painter, Seager, otherwise apparently un-
known. The sonnets were also signed ‘Ch. M.’ While
Marlowe’s authorship is highly improbable, it is to be
regretted that the communication in Notes and Queries
raised no further inquiry and that the manuscript has
disappeared.

Another attribution is, on the face of it, much more
plausible. Thomas Warton asserted, on the authority of
Thomas Coxeter’s manuscript papers, that Marlowe had
‘translated Coluthus’s Rape of Helen into English rhyme
in the year 1587’. Coxeter, an antiquarian collector in the
earlier eighteenth century, has a doubtful reputation, and
no one else had seen a copy of the translation. But in the

^ See below, pp. 237-8.

^ Eccles, Marlowe in London^ pp. 162-71.

224 MARLOWE’S POEMS

light of Marlowe’s association with Thomas Watson, it is
notable that the latter had in 1586 published a Latin
version, Helenae Raptus^ of the Greek epic in 400 hexa-
meters by Coluthus, a sixth-century poet of Lycopolis
in the Egyptian Thebaid. With Marlowe’s passionate
adoration of Helen it would have been natural for him
to turn Watson’s Latin verse into English. And how apt
a counterpart it would be to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander^
inspired by a kindred source (also probably through a
Latin translation), the Greek poem of the fifth-century
Alexandrian, ‘divine Musaeus’.

HERO AND LEANDER

On 28 September 1593 ‘a booke intituled HERO and
LEANDER beinge an amorous poem devised by CHRIS-
TOFER MARLOW’ was entered on the Stationers’
Register to John Wolf. If he published an edition, no
copy has survived. By 1598 he had made over his right
to Edward Blount who in that year brought out a quarto,
printed by Adam Islip, and dedicated to Sir Thomas
Walsingham,^ containing Marlowe’s unfinished portion of
the poem. Of this edition only one copy survives, now
in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. On
2 March 1597/8 Blount in his turn transferred his interest
(though not wholly) to Paul Linley, who later in the year
published a quarto, printed by Felix Kingston, containing
‘HERO AND LEANDER: Begun by Christopher Marloe;
and finished by George Chapman’. Two copies of this
previously unknown edition were discovered in 1857 at
Lamport Hall. One is in the British Museum and the
other in the Huntington Library. Linley’s edition con-
tains Marlowe’s two ‘Sestiads’, followed by four by Chap-
man, who in a separate dedication to Lady Walsingham
profusely apologizes for concerning himself with so trifling
a subject.

* See further, pp. 281-2.

HERO AND LEANDER 225

Mention has already been made of the passing of the
copyright in Hero and Leander, as well as of the translation
oi Lucan, from Linleyto John Flasket, ^ who published
editions of the poem, with Chapman’s continuation, in
1600 and 1606.

As Hero and Leander was left unfinished, it has been
natural to assign it to the end of Marlowe’s career.
Blount’s dedication of it to Sir Thomas Walsingham may
even suggest that the poet was engaged on it while he was
visiting Scadbury. And internal evidence in the main
favours a late date. This is supported by the large pro-
portion of run-on lines and double endings in Hero and
Leander as contrasted with the end-stopped couplets of
the Elegies, though allowance has to be made for a differ-
ence of technique in a translation of Ovid’s elegiacs and
in an original poem. Another less noticed point is the
absence in Hero and Leander of the colloquial phrases
which, as has been seen, often produced in the Elegies
a jarring effect. Marlowe’s verbal artistry is more mature.

On the other hand the poem has links with what are
usually accounted Marlowe’s earlier works. Apart from
minor points of contact one line in Hero and Leander,
i. 382,

Threat’ning a thousand deaths at every glance
is identical with Dido, ii. i. 231. And, as will be seen,
Marlowe when writing the poem was steeped in Ovidian
memories of the A mores and the Heroides. It is possible
that in the Lucan translation and in Hero and Leander
Marlowe may have made use, even at an early period, of
run-on lines which had little place in his dramatic
dialogue.

At whatever period Hero and Leander was written
echoes from Ovid’s Elegies were ringing in Marlowe’s ears.
When the youth enamoured of the maiden at first sight
cries (i. 207-8):

My words shall be as spotless as my youth,

Full of simplicity and naked truth —

* See above, pp. 42-3.

4427

MARLOWE’S POEMS

226

he is repeating the plea of Ovid to his mistress {El. i. iii.
5-6, and 13-14):

Accept him that will serve thee all his youth,

Accept him that will love with spotless truth

My spotless life, which but to gods gives place.

Naked simplicity, and modest grace.

And when Leander urges (i. 231-42):

Vessels of brass oft handled, brightly shine.

Rich robes themselves and others do adorn;

Neither themselves nor others, if not worn.

Who builds a palace and rams up the gate.

Shall see it ruinous and desolate;

Ah simple Hero, learn thyself to cherish,

Lone women like to empty houses perish —

he is expanding and turning to his use the argument of
the lena^ Dipsas {Kl. i. viii. 51-2):

Brass shines with use: good garments would be worn;
Houses not dwelt in arc with filth forlorn.

And there arc other parallels, though not so close and
indisputable.

In the Elegies there is only one incidental reference to
Hero and Leander (ii. xvi. 31-2)

'riie youth oft swimming to his Hero kind.

Had then swum over, but the way was blind.

But in the HeroideSy xviii and xix, the two lovers ex-
change lengthy epistles, which Marlowe doubtless had in
mind when Leander (ii. 14-15)

after her a letter sent.

Which joyful Hero answer’d.

It was the confession of Leander in (xviii. 13-14)
Non potcram celarc meos, velut ante, parentes,
quemque tegi volumus, non latuisset amor

that prompted Marlowe’s (ii. 136-7);

I.eander’s father knew where he had been.

And for the same mildly rebuk’d his son.

HERO AND LEANDER 227

So, too. Hero’s fears and suspicions in her epistle seem to
have suggested the line (ii. 43) :

Now wax’d she jealous, lest his love abated.

Leander’s father and Hero’s jealousy arc equally absent
from the main source of Marlowe’s poem, the Hero and
Lea 7 ider of Musacus, w^hether in the original Greek or in
a translation. Printed in Greek, apparently for the first
time in 1484, it had been translated into Italian by Tasso
in 1537, into Erench by Marot in 1541, and into Latin
by F. Paulinus in 1587. Minor links have been suggested
between Marlowe’s poem and the Italian and French
versions, but he probably drew the story of the lovers
chiefly from the Latin of Paulinus. Not only in its main
incidents, but in some special details, as will be seen,
Marlowe reproduced the neo-classic romance.

But as handled by the English poet it becomes, even
though uncompleted, far more than the tale of the two
star-crossed lovers. I have already stressed the fad that
the AmoreSy in addition to its other aspects, is a store-
house of mythological lorc.^ And in the Heroides Leander
and Hero sprinkle their epistles fully with allusions to
Greek deities and legendary figures. Influenced in part
by Ovid, Marlowe crowds his canvas with such elaborate
extraneous detail from the classical Pantheon that his
hero and heroine become often obscured. This is flagrantly
so in the last hundred lines of Sestiad I where quite
irrelevantly Marlowe turns aside to tell a tale of Mercury,
Jove, Cupid, and the Destinies, ending with a lament
over the poverty which is in consequence the heritage of
Mercury’s devotees. No less redundant is the long episode
(ii. 155-226) narrating the passionof Neptune for Leander.
And the same homosexual element enters into the lines,
i. 77-86, beginning

Had wild Hippolytus Leander seen,

Enamoured of his beauty had he been,

* See above, pp. 31-2.

228

MARLOWE’S POEMS

and, in part, into those that describe (i. 143-56)

the gods in sundry shapes
Committing heady riots, incest, rapes,

pictured on the ‘radiant floor’ of Venus’ temple in
Sestos.

Marlowe even introduces Hero with a mythological
flourish, seemingly of his own invention (i. 5-7) :

Hero the fair,

Whom young Apollo courted for her hair.

And offer’d as a dower his burning throne.

The sleeves of her garment were (i. 11-14)

bordered with a grove.

Where Venus in her naked glory strove
To please the careless and disdainful eyes
Of proud Adonis that before her lies.

Leander, too, makes his entry amid a shower of
mythological allusions (i. 55-62):

His dangling tresses that were never shorn.

Had they been cut, and unto Colchos borne.

Would have allur’d the vent’rous youth of Greece
To hazard more than for the golden Fleece.

Fair Cynthia wish’d his arms might be her sphere:

Grief makes her pale, because she moves not there.

His body was as straight as Circe’s wand,

Jove might have sipt out nectar from his hand.

Besides these set pieces there is a running fire through-
out the two Sestiads of classical similes and references.
It is scarcely too much to say that Marlowe had, at any
rate subconsciously, a double object in Hero and Leander^
to tell the story of the lovers and to load every rift with
mythological ore. It is, therefore, in a sense, beside the
point to criticize the poem for its lack of unity. Marlowe
is joyously travelling in ‘the realms of gold’, and glories
in exploring their by-ways rather than in steering a direct
course.

None the less he shows a mastery in the conduct of his
central theme and stamps his own genius upon it. He

HERO AND LEANDER 229

borrows from Musaeus the introductory episode of the
festival in the Sestian temple of Venus where Hero and
Leander first meet. But he fills in the picture with fresh
and vivid detail, as in the dazzling description of the
temple itself (i. 135-42):

So fair a church as this, had Venus none:

The walls were of discoloured jasper stone,

Wherein was Proteus carved, and overhead
A lively vine of green sea-agate spread;

Where by one hand, light-headed Bacchus hung.

And with the other, wine from grapes outwrung.

Of crystal shining fair the pavement was ;

The town of Sestos calPd it Venus’ glass.

Musaeus describes the youths from the islands near and
from Phrygia hasting on the day to pay their vows to the
fair ones of Sestos. Marlowe heightens the picture with
characteristic celestial imagery (i. 94-103):

Thither resorted many a wand’ring guest
To meet their loves: such as had none at all.

Came lovers home, from this great festival:

For every street like to a firmament
Glistered with breathing stars, who where they went.
Frighted the melancholy earth, which deem’d
Eternal heaven to burn, for so it seem’d.

As if another Phaeton had got

The guidance of the sun’s rich chariot.

But far above the loveliest Hero shined.

Then follows an elaborate comparison of Hero to the
moon ‘crown’d with blazing light and majesty’, succeeded
by an unexpected image that brings us abruptly into the
atmosphere of Tamburlaine:

And as in fury of a dreadful fight,

Their fellows being slain or put to flight.

Poor soldiers stand with fear of death dead-strooken,

So at her presence all surpris’d and tooken
Await the sentence of her scornful eyes ;

He whom she favours lives; the other dies.

230 MARLOWE’S POEMS

Yet it is difficult, on the face of it, to associate with the
author of T amburlaine^ at any period of his career, the
couplet (i. 167-8):

It lies not in our power to love, or hate,

For will in us is over-rul’d by fate.

If the second line is taken in its naked simplicity, and
in its natural interpretation to-day, it is the negation of
the dominant spirit of Marlovian drama where the human
will soars above all limitations and boasts that it holds
‘the fates fast bound in iron chains’. But in the light of the
first line, ‘will’ is here to be interpreted in its narrower
Elizabethan sense of amorous desire, or its opposite. This
does not spring from conscious reasoning; but from a
primal impulse that, in modern phrase, is stronger than
ourselves and carries us headlong.

Where both deliberate, the love is slight;

Who ever lov’d that lov’d not at first sight ?

So is it with Leander and Hero, with Tamburlaine and
Zenocrate, with Faustus and Helen. Is it really a compli-
ment to Marlowe that Shakespeare 'm As Tou Like It should
put the last line into the mouth of Phebe to vindicate
her sudden infatuation for Rosalind disguised as a youth ?

But though love is not the offspring of reasoning it can
make use of it for its own purposes. Though Hero was
enamoured, she displayed a maidenly coyness towards
Leander.

At last, like to a bold sharp sophister.

With cheerful hope thus he accosted her.

The use of the term ‘sophister’ borrowed from the
academic schools prepares us for a ‘disputation’ from
Leander’s lips on the superiority of wedlock to spinster-
hood, very different from the conventional lover’s pleas
in Musaeus. He first plies Hero with the arguments,
already noted, borrowed from Ovid, and then advances to

HERO AND LEANDER 23,

a more subtle dialectic, for which Aristotle gives the cue

(i- 255):

One is no number; maids are nothing then,

Without the sweet society of men.

Wilt thou live single still? one shalt thou be,

Though never-singling Hymen couple thee.

Base bullion for the stamp’s sake we allow;

Even so for men’s impression do we you;

By which alone, our reverend fathers say.

Women receive perfection every way.

This idol which you term Virginity,

Is neither essence subject to the eye.

No, nor to any one exterior sense.

Nor hath it any place of residence,

Nor is ’t of earth or mould celestial.

Or capable of any form at all.

Of that which hath no being do not boast.

Things that are not at all are never lost.

Is Marlowe here remembering discussions in his class
at Cambridge, or later metaphysical arguments with
Harriot and Raleigh ? In any case we may well again cry :

Was ever woman in this humour wooed?

Was ever woman in this humour won?

For Hero is won, though she stiU makes a pretence of
fight (i. 329-32):

These arguments he us’d, and many more.

Wherewith she yielded, that was won before;

Hero’s looks yielded, but her words made war;

Women are won when they begin to jar.

Though she forbids Leander — and here Marlowe fol-
lows Musaeus — to embrace her or to touch her ‘sacred
garments’, she surrenders the key of the fort (i. 345 ff.):

^Upon a rock, and underneath a hill,

Far from the town (where all is whist and still
Save that the sea, playing on yellow sand.

Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land)

232 MARLOWE’S POEMS

My turret stands . . .

Come thither.’ As she spake this, her tongue tripp’d,
For unawares ‘Come thither’ from her slipp’d.

It is an exquisite vignette, rare in Marlowe, of nature
in a peaceful, gentle mood, fit background to the maiden
who is herself so ‘whist and still’ that she can only whisper
the two inviting words. And then in more characteristic
vein the poet whirls us upwards to the empyrean (i.

361-4):

And like a planet moving several ways
At one self instant, she poor soul assays,

Loving, not to love at all, and every part
Strove to resist the motions of her heart.

It is at this point that Marlowe breaks off to tell the
tale of Mercury, Cupid, Jove, and the Destinies. But
when he returns at the beginning of the second Sestiad
to his main theme, Leander, who in Musaeus after his
first meeting with Hero recrosses the Hellespont to
Abydos, is already entering her tower (ii. 19-21):

Wide open stood the door, he need not climb.

And she herself before the pointed time

Had spread the board, with roses strowed the room.

The remainder of the Sestiad, except for the Neptune
interlude, is a minute study of the stages by which the
lover progresses to the full possession of his mistress. It is
a frankly sensuous revelation, in which Marlowe proves
himself a disciple of Ovid rather than of Musaeus. He
shows how Leander, as yet a novice, becomes a master
of the art of love. At their first encounter in the tower he
has to be content with kisses and embraces. Hero though
‘seeming lavish, sav’d her maidenhead’.

Jewels being lost are found again, this never,

’Tis lost but once and once lost, lost for ever.

It is after the first night in the tower that Marlowe
represents Leander as returning to Abydos. And once

HERO AND LEANDER 233

again he goes to astronomy for an image of his distracted
state (ii. 123-8):

Like as the sun in a diameter

Fires and inflames objects removed far,

And heateth kindly, shining laterally:

So beauty sweetly quickens when ’tis nigh,

But being separate and removed,

Burns where it cherish’d, murders where it loved.

His secret flame apparently was seen
Leander’s father knew where he had been.

But parental rebuke could not stay him from plunging
into the Hellespont, nor Neptune’s amorous enticements
from crossing the strait to Sestos. He ran breathless to
Hero’s tower:

And knock’d and called ; at which celestial noise

She stayed not for her robes, but straight arose
And drunk with gladness, to the door she goes.

The purest rapture of expectant love thrills through
these lines and glorifies what follows. Marlowe had
evidently here in mind, and repeats some of the phrases
from, one of the most sensuous of the Elegies (i. v). But
the grossness of the verses in which Ovid tells of his
intercourse with Corinna is purged by the brisk ani-
mation and delicate humour of Marlowe’s narrative.
Leander ‘through numbing cold all feeble, faint and wan’,
begs if not for love, yet for pity, to be taken into Hero’s
bed. When Hero ‘affrighted’ shrinks away, and makes
room for him (ii. 259-66) :

His hands he cast upon her like a snare ;

She overcome with shame and sallow fear.

Like chaste Diana when Acteon spied her.

Being suddenly betrayed, div’d down to hide her,

And as her silver body downward went.

With both her hands she made the bed a tent.

And in her own mind thought herself secure,

O’ercast with dim and darksome coverture.

H h

4427

MARLOWE’S POEMS

234

But it is a false security, and soon ‘the poor silly maiden
at his mercy was’.

Then with one of his characteristic abrupt transitions
Marlowe confronts Love as an elemental force, reckless of
all but its own ends (ii. 287-93) :

Love is not full of pity, as men say,

But deaf and cruel where he means to prey.

Even as a bird, which in our hands we wring,

Forth plungeth, and oft flutters with her wing,

She trembling strove, this strife of hers (like that
Which made the world) another world begat
Of unknown joy.

Marlowe seems to be a forerunner of the ‘metaphysical’
school when he here, with another reminiscence of the
Cambridge classroom, prays in aid as a parallel the
Empedoclean doctrine that strife begot the universe.
And when ‘the pleasure of the blessed night’ is over, and
Hero stands blushing beside the bed, the loveliest of all
Marlowe’s cosmic images irradiates the scene (ii. 318-22):
And from her countenance behold ye might
A kind of twilight break, which through the hair,

As from an orient cloud, glimps’d here and there;

And round about the chamber this false morn
Brought forth the day before the day was born.

It is such images, strewn through the poem, that even
in its most sensuous episodes make its raptures, in
Drayton’s words, ‘all air and fire’. They are ‘magic case-
ments opening’ from Hero’s tower upon sky and sea, and
purifying its heated atmosphere.

And throughout Hero and Leander Marlowe shows a
linguistic and metrical mastery. His vocabulary is akin
to that of his translation of the Amores in its admixture
of words, either rare or used in an unusual sense, e.g.
‘thirling’ (flying through the air), ‘parled’ (spoke), ‘idiot’
(ignorant person), ‘put’ (repelled), ‘affied’ (betrothed),
‘pais’d’ (weighed), ‘ringled’ ( ? marked with rings),
‘dang’d’ (threw). There is also a copious use, as in the
ElegieSy of compound epithets, ‘night-wandering’, ‘deep-

HERO AND LEANDER 235

drench’d’, ‘ never-singling’, ‘flint-breasted,’ ‘sapphire-
visaged’, ‘dead-strooken’. On the other hand, there is
almost a complete absence of the colloquialisms, and of
the occasional obscurities that are found in the transla-
tion. The language of Hero and Leander is almost uni-
formly lucid and, in the best sense of the word, elegant.

Metrically the frequent double rhymes and epigram-
matic couplets connect the poem with the Elegies. And
as has been seen, there are passages in the translation
which reach a high rhythmical level. But the general
metrical quality of the Elegies and of Hero and Leander
is strikingly different. Where the one makes its best effects
by the cumulative massing of a series of sonorous couplets
the latter relies mainly on the ‘run-on’ line. Its music is
thus far more subtle, and the flow of the verse far more
rapid. It is these that, in spite of the delaying interludes,
give Hero and Leander as a whole so exhilarating a move-
ment and make us deplore that it was left incomplete.
Had Marlowe intended to keep, however broadly, to the
proportions of Musaeus’ poem, he is more likely to have
added one Sestiad than the four of Chapman’s con-
tinuation.

But if we arc to speculate about what might have been,
we may perhaps regret that Marlowe did not make a play
out of the tragic story, and provide what might have been
a companion piece to Romeo and Juliet^ as Edward II is
to Richard II. But, as has been seen, in his only accepted
play where love is the dominant theme. Dido, Queen of
Carthage, it is not passion between a youth and a maiden
wrecked by raging seas or family feuds. It is the mature
love between two figures of heroic mould which has to be
sacrificed to a divine decree, and to an imperial destiny.

XIV

MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS

GREENE AND KYD

About the same time that P. F.’s English Faust Book
being published and furnishing Marlowe with
material so attractive to his genius, he seems to have been
again getting into trouble with the Shoreditch legal
authorities. Mark Eccles discovered from an entry” in
Middlesex Sessions Roll 309, no. 13, that ‘Christopherus
Marie de London generosus’ entered on 9 May 1592 into
a recognizance under a penalty of £20 to appear at the
next General Session of the Peace, and meanwhile to keep
the peace towards Allen Nicholls, Constable of Holywell
Street and Nicholas Helliott, sub-constable.^ It is true
that there were five other Christopher Morlcys living in
London in 1592? but as Eccles has shown, none of them
resided near Holywell Street.^ In this theatrical neigh-
bourhood the dramatist seems to have continued living
since appearing at the Gaol delivery in December 1589.
There is no entry to show that on this later occasion he
made the requisite appearance in the first week after
Michaelmas.

In any case the charge was a less serious one than the
suspicion of murdering Bradley. The memory of the
Hog lane affray and its consequences must have come
home to Marlowe in September 1592 when Thomas
Watson died. On 10 November his Amintae Gaudia was
entered in the Stationers’ Register, and was published
with a Latin dedication to the Countess of Pembroke
signed ‘C. M.’^ In the light of what is now known of the
association of Marlowe and Watson there is good reason

* The document is quoted in the original Latin in Christopher Marlowe
in London^ p. 105. 2 Op. cit., pp. 109-13.

3 Printed in full by Eccles, op. cit., p. 164.

GREENE AND KYD 237

for identifying ‘C. M.’ as the dramatist. The profusion
of classical allusions in the dedication is characteristic of
him. Thus the high-flown invocation begins :

Illustrissimae Heroinse omnibus et animi ct corporis
dotibus ornatissimse, Mariae Pembrokire Comitisscc.

Laurigera stirpe prognata Delia, Sydncci vatis Apollinei
genuina soror; Alma literarum parens, ad cuius immaculatos
amplexus, confugit virtus, barbariei Sc ignorantiae impetu violata,
vt olim a Threicio Tyranno Philomela.

Then follow allusions to Ariadne, Phoebus, Jupiter,
to the ‘littorea myrtus Veneris’ and ^Nymphai Peneisc
[Daphne] semper virens coma’. It seems to me also in
Marlowe’s dialectical vein, after he has declared that the
renown of the Countess cannot be increased by the praise
of mortals, to add ‘quomodo enim quicquam possit esse
infinito plus?’ On the other hand, even allowing for the
conventions of Elizabethan dedications, it is surprising to
find the author of T amburlaine and Doctor Faustus be-
littling his own powers to the degree implied in these
words :

‘Dia proles, qua3 iam rudi calamo, spiritus infundis elati furoris,
quibus ipse misellus, plus mihi videor prxstare posse, quam cruda
nostra indoles proferre solet.’

There was certainly no mark of ‘cruda indoles’ in
Edward II which the players of the Countess of Pem-
broke’s husband were performing in this same year.

Thomas Watson was almost immediately followed to
the grave by one of the leading figures on the Bench at
the Gaol-Delivery of 3 December 1589. Sir Roger Man-
wood, Chief Baron of the Exchequer, died on 14 December
1592, and was buried in the church of his manor of Hawe,
near Canterbury. Manwood had been guilty of mal-
practices in his high office, and had been arraigned before
the Privy Council. Yet in the Oxinden Commonplace
books and the Heber copy of Hero and Leander^ there is
found an epitaph on him in twelve Latin hexameter lines,
‘made by Christopher Mario’. The ascription of the epi-
* See above, p. 19 n.

238 MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS

taph to Marlowe thus goes back to 1640, within half a
century of his death, and apparently rests on a well-
authenticated tradition, though it is difficult to see why
the dramatist, who had apparently neglected to keep up
any ties with his native city, should have taken occasion
to celebrate the somewhat doubtful virtues of this de-
ceased neighbouring ‘worthy’. The lines, if they are by
Marlowe, would have an interest as being the only extant
Latin verses from his pen, but they are in the conven-
tional vein of an epitaph, bidding criminals rejoice, and
the innocent mourn for the death of ‘fori lumen, vene-
randse gloria legis’. Perhaps the prayer to ‘livor’ or
‘malice’ to spare his ashes may be a veiled hint that all
was not well with his name.

The deaths of Watson and Manwood had been pre-
ceded by some months by that of a more familiar figure
who had also come within Marlowe’s orbit. Robert
Greene died on 3 September 1592, In his last hours he
penned the pamphlet Greenes Groats-worth of Wit bought
with a Million of Repentance y including towards its close
an exhortation ‘To those Gentlemen his Quondam ac-
quaintance that spend their wits in making Plaies’. There
are five of these Gentlemen whom he bids learn by his
woeful experience to look back with sorrow on their time
past, and endeavour with repentance to spend that which
is to come.

He then first singles out Marlowe (for no other can be
meant), and now in sorrow, instead of anger as in 1588,^
reproves him for atheism :

‘Wonder not (for with thee wil I first begin) thou famous gracer
of Tragedians, that Greene who hath said with thee like the foole
in his heart, there is no God, should now giue glorie vnto his
greatnesse: for penetrating is his power, his hand lies heauie
vpon me, he hath spoken vnto me with a voice of thunder, and
I haue felt he is a God that can punish enemies. Why should thy
excellent wit, his gift, be so blinded, that thou should giue no
glory to the giuer?’

* See above, pp. 70 and in.

GREENE AND KYD 239

The words that follow show that Greene is thinking of
atheism in terms not only of doctrine but of morals, for
though Prince reveals a consistent theory of life

which quietly and temperately sets aside the laws of
Christianity’^ its author was not directly concerned with
religious belief or unbelief.

‘Is it pestilent Machiuilian pollicie that thou hast studied?
O peeuish follie! What are his rules but meere confused mockeries,
able to extirpate in small time the generation of mankinde. For
if Sic V olo^ sic iubeo, hold in those that are able to commande, and
if it be lawfull Fas nefas to doe any thing that is beneficiall,
onely Tyrants shuld possesse the earth, and they striuing to excecde
in tyranny, shuld each to other bee a slaughter man; till the
mightiest outliuing all, one stroke were left for Death, that in one
age man’s life shuld cnde.’

Here Greene, addressing Marlowe, catches for the
moment the secret of his soaring and sombre rhetoric in
this vision of the final catastrophe of mankind. He con-
tinues with a somewhat enigmatic reference:

The brother of this Diabolicall Atheisme is dead, and in his
life had neuer the felicitie he aimed at. . . . Wilt thou my friend
be his Disciple ? Looke vnto me, by him perswaded to this libertie,
and thou shalt finde it an infernall bondage. I knowe the least of
my demerits merit this miserable death, but wilfull striuing against
knowne truth exceedeth al the terrors of my soule. Defer not
(with me) till this last point of extremitie; for little knowest thou
how in the end thou shalt be visited.’

In the light of the tragedy at Deptford on 30 May 1593
the last words were to be more luridly prophetic than the
dying Greene could have foreseen. Then after milder
admonitions to two other dramatists, almost certainly
Nashe and Peele, he warns the trio against putting any
trust in actors, though he acknowledges that they have
consorted more with him than with them:

‘Base minded men al three of you, if by my miserie ye be not
warned : for vnto none of you (like me) sought those burres to cleaue :

* Una Ellis-Fermor, Christopher Marlowe^ p. 91.

240 MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS

those Puppits (I meane) that speake from our mouths, those
Anticts garnisht in our colours.’

Then follows the outburst against Shakespeare the ‘vp-
start’ actor, who has had the temerity also to pose as a
playwright.^ From this Greene turns to entreat Marlowe
and the other dramatists to adopt ‘more profitable courses
. . . for it is a pittie men of such rare wits should be
subiect to the pleasures of such rude groomes’. It is a
paradox to hear the arch- Bohemian Robert Greene at the
end of his days denouncing professional players as vio-
lently as the most stiff-necked of the contemporary
academic enemies of the public stage.

Soon after Greene’s death his Groatsworth of Wit was
edited by Henry Chettle, and the letters to divers play-
makers was ‘offensively by one or two of them taken’.
This is acknowledged by Chettle in an introduction to his
Kind-Harts Dreamey registered on 8 December 1592, in
which he disclaimed any part in Groatsworth of Wity
except for rewriting the ‘copy’, as ‘sometime Greenes hand
was none of the best’. Chettle asserts that ‘with neither
of them that take offence was I acquainted’. But with
one of them, who would seem to be Shakespeare, he im-
plies that he has since then been in contact, ‘because my
selfe haue scene his demeanor no less ciuill than be exelent
in the qualitie he professes’. He has also heard from
‘diuers of worship’ of ‘his uprightnes of dealing’ and of
his ‘facetious grace in writing’. Thus Chettle makes
handsome amends to Shakespeare for Greene’s attack by
a comprehensive tribute to his personal character, his
talent as an actor, and his achievement as a writer. In
sharp contrast is his attitude towards the other offended
playwright, who can be no other than Marlowe. With
him he cares not if he never became acquainted, though
he reverences his learning, ‘and at the perusing of Greenes
Booke stroke out what then in conscience I thought he
in some displeasure writ; or had it been true, yet to
publish it was int oiler able’. With all respect for Chettle’s

' See above, p. 193.

MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS 241

creditable scruples one cannot help regretting that he
omitted details from Greene’s exhortation to Marlowe
which might have thrown light on the ‘intollerable’ ac-
cusations which were in a few months to be brought
against him from other quarters.

It has been seen, on the word of Thomas Kyd, that he
and Christopher Marlowe had been associated at least as
early as the first summer months of 1591, when they were
writing in one chamber together. ^ But their acquaintance
probably dated back farther, for after the reference to
‘twoe yeares synce’, Kyd immediately proceeds to tell the
Lord Keeper, ‘My first acquaintance with this Marlowe,
rose vpon his bearing name to serve my Lord although
his Lordship never knewe his service, but in writing for
his plaiers.’ It is one of the most tantalizing problems in
Marlovian biography that Kyd omits to give a clue to the
identification of this lord of whose household he had been
a member in some unspecified capacity for nearly six
years, ^ and for whose company Marlowe wrote. On the
evidence of title-pages and of Hcnslowe’s diary the com-
panies known to have acted Marlowe’s plays during his
lifetime were those of the Lord Admiral (jl amburlaine)^
Lord Strange (The Jew of Malta and The Massacre at
Paris')^ and Lord Pembroke (Edward II). On the assump-
tion that Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, had no
company before 1592 he is ruled out. Charles Howard,
2nd Lord Howard of Effingham, who had been Lord
Chamberlain, and afterwards Lord High Admiral from
8 July 1585 and had held the chief command against the
Armada was, it may be assumed, too august a personage
for Kyd to assure the Lord Keeper that he ‘wold no waie
move the Leste suspicion of his Loves and cares both
towardes hir sacred Majestie your Lordships and the
lawes’. Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, though soon
to succeed as 5th Earl of Derby, was of less exalted station,

* See above, p. 1 1 1.

^ In my edition of Kyds Works ^ p. cix, for ‘theis iij yeres nowe’ read
‘theis vj yeres nowe’.

4427

MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS

242

and had a connexion with Kyd as his men acted
Spanish tragedy in 1591/2-1592/3. He may have been the
patron-lord,^ but the matter must remain in doubt.

In any case it is important to keep clear the circum-
stances in which Kyd’s letter to the Lord Keeper was
written. He was arrested on 12 May 1593 on suspicion of
being guilty of what he calls in his letter ^that libell that
concern’d the state’, and ‘that mutinous sedition towr’d
the state’. On the previous day the Privy Council had
directed a body of commissioners appointed by the Lord
Mayor to arrest and examine any persons suspected of
lately setting up ‘diuers lewd and mutinous libells’ within
the city of London, to search their chambers for writings
or papers, and, in default of confession to ‘put them to the
Torture in Bridewell’.^ There can be little doubt that
it was under this general warrant that Kyd was arrested,
and as he speaks of ‘my paines and vndeserved tortures’ he
appears to have been put on the rack. But in his letter
he is careful to distinguished between the offence against
the state of which (as he protests) he was unjustly sus-
pected and the further charge of atheism which only arose
after the discovery among his papers of the heretical
disputation which had belonged to Marlowe. In his
feverish anxiety to clear himself of this deadlier charge
Kyd does not hesitate to minimize the extent of his
association with Marlowe and to defame his character.

Never cold my Lord endure his name or sight, when he had
heard of his conditions, nor wold indeed the forme of devyne
praiers vsed duelie in his Lordships house haue quadred w^^ such
reprobates.

That I shold loue or be familer frend w^** one so irreligious were
verie rare . . . besides he was intemperate & of a cruel hart, the
verie contraries to w*^*', my greatest enemies will saie by me.

Kyd then refers Puckering to Marlowe’s more intimate
associates for more detailed information, but apparently

* His claims are set forth by Tucker Brooke (op. cit., p. 47), who states
objections to my suggestion, in op. cit., p. kiv, of Robert Radcliffe, 5th
Earl of Sussex. ^ See Kyd*s Works^ p. Ixvii.

GREENE AND KYD 243

the Lord Keeper pressed him to amplify his statement.
For there is another letter, unsigned but in his hand,* as
follows :

Pleaseth it your honorable lordship toching marlowes monstruous
opinions as I cannot but with an agreved conscience think on him
or them so can I but particular^ fewe in the respect of them that
kept him greater company. Howbeit in discharg of dutie both
towardes god your lordships & the world thus much haue I thought
good breiflie to discover in all humblenes.

ffirst it was his custom when I knewe him first & as I heare saie
he contynewd it in table talk or otherwise to iest at the devine
scriptures gybe at praiers, & stryve in argument to frustrate & con-
fute what hath byn spoke or wrytt by prophets 8 c such holie menn.

1. He wold report St John to be our savior Christes Alexis,
I cover it with reverence and trembling that is that Christ did
loue him with an extraordinary loue.

2. That for me to wryte a poem of St paules conversion as I was
determined he said wold be as if I shold go wryte a book of fast
& loose, esteeming Paul a Jugler.

3. That the prodigall Childes portion was but fower nobles, he
held his purse so neere the bottom in all pictures, and that it either
was a iest or els fowr nobles then was thought a great patrimony
not thinking it a parable.

4. That things esteemed to be donn by devine power might haue
aswell been don by observation of men all which he wold so
sodenlie take slight occasion to slyp out as I & many others in regard
of his other rashnes in attempting soden pryvic iniuries to men did
ouerslypp thogh often reprehend him for it & for which god is
my witnes aswell by my lordes comaundment as in hatred of his
life & thoughts I left 8 c did refraine his companie.

Then in a final sentence Kyd turns from the discussion
of Marlowe’s heretical utterances and his personal qualities
to bring against him a political charge of a treasonable
nature.

He wold perswade with men of quallitie to goe vnto the k[ing]
of SeoUs whether I heare Royden is gon and where if he had liud
he told me when I sawe him last he meant to be.

* Identified by Ford K. Brown and first printed, not quite accurately,
in T.L,S., 2 June 1911.

244 MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS

Matthew Roydon is the only friend of Marlowe men-
tioned by Kyd in both his letters. He is best known by
his elegy on Sidney and by the very complimentary refer-
ences to him by Nashe and Chapman. There is further
probable evidence of his association with the group of
whom Raleigh was patron. But nothing has come to
light of any such political activities as are suggested by
Kyd.

Kyd’s letters to Puckering were written after Marlowe’s
death, but they doubtless echo statements made by him
when examined by the Lord Mayor’s commissioners after
the discovery of the disputation among his papers on
12 May. And in consequence thereof, a few days later,
on 1 8 May, the Privy Council issued a warrant for Mar-
lowe’s arrest. They directed Henry Maunder, one of the
messengers of Her Majesty’s Chamber,

‘to repaire to the house of Mr Tho. Walsingham in Kent, or to
anie other place where he shall vnderstand Christofer Marlow
to be remayning, and by vertue thereof to apprehend, and bring
him to the Court in his Companie. And in case of need to require
aid.’

Maunder had no difficulty in carrying out the Council’s
order, for on 20 May there follows an entry:

‘This day Christofer Marlcy of London, gentleman, being sent
for by warrant from their Lordships, hath entered his appearance
accordinglic for his Indemnity therein ; and is commaunded to giue
his daily attendaunce on their Lordships vntill he shalbe lycensed
to the contrary.’

The good luck that Marlowe had so often enjoyed at
critical periods still followed him. Instead of being im-
prisoned and tortured like Kyd he was ordered after the
customary formula to give his daily attendance on their
lordships till he was licensed to the contrary.

The Privy Council evidently did not think it necessary
to deal severely with Marlowe. But I cannot accept the
view of Tucker Brooke that he was summoned as a witness
rather than as a malefactor. In such cases the Council

GREENE AND KYD 245

merely sent an order to the person in question to attend.
It was a very different procedure to dispatch a messenger
to "apprehend’ Marlowe, with the significant proviso, ‘and
in case of need to require aid’.

But the exercise of force was not needed, and it was
doubtless in the dramatist’s favour that he had been stay-
ing with Thomas Walsingham at Scadbury. Thomas was
related in a younger generation to the late Secretary of
State, Sir Francis Walsingham, who had thought well of
him and employed him as a political agent. He was in
favour, too, with the Queen, who was later to visit him
at Scadbury and there knight him. He was a patron of
men of letters, and it may have been Thomas Watson
who brought Marlowe to his notice.

Scadbury, in the Chislehurst neighbourhood, was a
pleasant haven at a time when the plague was raging in
London and the theatres had been closed. But it may not
have been ready to open its gates to him again after
Henry Maunder’s visit. At any rate on 30 May, ten days
after his appearance before the Privy Council, Marlowe
is found to be at Deptford. Meanwhile, however, further
charges were being formulated against him not by fellow-
playwrights, but by an informer, one Richard Baines.

RICHARD BAINES’S NOTE

Who was this Richard Baines who so suddenly steps into
the foreground with ‘A Note Containing the opinion of
one Christopher Marly, concerning his damnable iudg-
ment of religion and scorn of Gods word’? It helps to the
identification that Richard Baines (with its surname
variants, Baynes and Banes) does not seem to have been
a common name at the period. There was a Richard
Baynes of Christ’s College, Cambridge, who matriculated
in November 1568, took his B.A. in 1572-3, and his M.A.
(at Caius) in 1576. There is nothing, however, to connect
him with Marlowe’s circle in London, with which the

246 MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS

writer of the ‘Note’ must have been familiar. This also
applies to Richard Baynes, a son of Thomas Baynes, of
Whaddon, Cambridgeshire, who mentions him in his will
of II May 1593, apparently as a minor. A Richard Banes,
a witness to the will of William ArnaU of Southwell, on
6 March 1541, is out of the question, owing to the date.
Of another Richard Banes merchant-tailor, buried in St.
Mary Abchurch on 6 February 1596/7 nothing seems
otherwise to be known. ^ It would therefore seem that
Tucker Brooke was warranted in seeking to identify the
author of the ‘Note’ with Richard Baines of the Middle
Temple, son of an elder Richard Baines, merchant of the
Staple in London, a dealer in wool, and a landowner in
Shropshire and Montgomeryshire,^ who was wealthy, un-
scrupulous and litigious, cast in the same mould as the
William Gardiner in Hotson’s Shakespeare versus Shallow,
The younger Richard was born in 1566 towards the end
of October, for the registers of St. Peter’s, Cornhill (Harl.
Soc. Regs., i. 12), contain the following entry:

1566 Nouem i Monday Christning of Richard Baynes sonne of . . .

The name of the father is unfortunately omitted here
and in a later entry:

1568 Februa 2 l^hursday Christning of Mary Banes daughter of. . .

But there is ample proof in documents quoted later
that they were the children of Richard Baines, merchant
of the Staple, who is mentioned in two further entries :

1577 June 23 Sonday Christning of Fraunces Baines daughter of
Richard Baines, merchant of y® Staple, born the 19^^ daye
of June.

1580 Nouem 6 Sonday Christning of Vrsula Baynes daughter of
Richard Banes Merchant Stapler; born the first of Nouem-
ber being tuesday.

Richard Baines, the younger, was, on this evidence, the
eldest of a family of four, and was his father’s only son

* Mark Eccles, op. cit., p. no.

^ See Appendix X to his Life of Marlowe.

RICHARD BAINES’S NOTE 247

and heir. He appears to have had the education suitable
to his position and prospects. Brooke quotes from the
Minutes of Parliament of the Middle Pemfle (i. 251, ed.
C. T. Martin) the admission entry on 21 May 1582, of
"M*" Richard, son and heir of Richard Baynes of Shrews-
bury, gent., S'pecially; fine ^5.’ The elder Baines had
presumably property in Shrewsbury as well as elsewhere
in the county of Salop, for this ‘M*" Richard’ is evidently
the same as the ‘Richard Baynes of the Middle Temple’,
son of the merchant of the Staple, deceased, the subject
of the Privy Council’s Orders on 31 December 1588, and
2 February 1588-9, quoted below. There is only one
Richard Baines in the Middle Temple admission lists.
But if he was born late in October 1566, he must have
been admitted at the unusually early age of fifteen and
a half. It seems, however, to have been at this time a fro
forma admission (members of the Inns of Court themselves
sometimes entered their children in infancy). For it was
usual then, as now, for law students to proceed to the
Inns of Court after residence at the university. Witness
the dialogue between Justice Shallow and his cousin
Silence in King Henry IV y Part II, Act iii, sc. ii:

Shallow. I daresay my cousin William is become a good scholar.

He is at Oxford still, is he not \

Silence. Indeed, sir, to my cost.

Shallow. He must then to the Inns of Court shortly.

Joseph Foster had therefore reason in his Alumni Oxoni-
enses for identifying the Mr. Richard Baynes of the
Middle Temple with ‘Richard Baynes of London, gent.’,
aged seventeen, who matriculated at Oxford, as a member
of St. John’s College, on 8 February 1583, but who had
come into residence at St. John’s in the Michaelmas Term,
1582. For in the college Buttery books his name appears
in the list of receipts for that term ^fro Batellis convic-
torurn^ — i.e. for the batells or bqard of commoners (as dis-
tinguished from ^socii\ or fellows). The entry is repeated
in the three later terms of the academical year 1582-3, in

248 MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS

the four terms of 1583-4, and in the first and last terms
of 1584-5. Thus Baines completed the greater part of his
academical course, though the interruption of his studies
during half of his last year at Oxford may help to account
for the fact that, so far as the records show, he did not
take a degree.

His father, who, according to Elizabethan standards of
age, was now growing old, may well have wished, as some
of the documents quoted later suggest, to initiate his son
and heir into some of his complicated financial affairs.
Any such association can have lasted little more than three
years. For we can now determine within a few days the
date of the death of Richard Baines, the elder. The burial
register of St. Peter’s, Cornhill, for 1588 contains the
following entry:

Decern 3 Tuesday M*’ Richard Baynes Merchant of the Staple,
pit in y® south Chapell yers 56.

Two days later, on 5 December, a commission
granted ‘Richardo Baynes filio naturali et legitimo
Richardi Baynes nuper dum vixit parochie omnium San-
ctorum maior in Themstreate Civitatis London defuncti’
to administer the goods of the same, ‘cum consensu Gracie
Baynes rclicte dicti defuncti’. There can be no doubt, as
the name of Grace Baines, the widow, proves, that the
reference here is to the merchant of the Staple and his
son Richard. But as his chief connexion in London was
with the parish of St. Peter’s, Cornhill, it is curious to
find him described as of the parish of All Hallows the
Great. Presumably he had some property there; every
new document adds to the extent of his holdings.

As the younger Richard was only twenty-two when his
father died intestate (as is stated in a letter of the Privy
Council, 31 December 1588), he was scarcely equal to the
responsibility of administering a considerable estate, and
he soon got into trouble. The Privy Council’s letter,
quoted by Tucker Brooke, states that the elder Richard
Baines, merchant of the Staple, had borrowed of John

RICHARD BAINES’S NOTE 249

St. Leger, merchant stranger, the sum of ^338. 15/., and
was, when he died, ‘of sufficient wealth and ability to dis-
charge the said debt’; but that his son Richard ‘secketh
by deceitful and subtle means to defraud the said St.
Leger’. He was therefore to pay him within some reason-
able time, or to be bound ‘to answer the same before their
Lordships with convenient speed’. The sequel is recorded
in a minute of the Privy Council, 2 February 1588-9:

Richard Baynes of the Middle Temple in London, gentleman,
being bound to make his appearance before the Lords of her
Majesty’s most honourable Privy Council, this day made his said
appearance, which for his indemnity for the said bond is entered
into this Register of Council, and he thereupon enjoined to give
his attendance daily on their Lordships till by their order he shall
be dismissed.

The formula, with the substitute of bond for warrant, is
practically the same as in the Privy Council minute of
20 May 1593, concerning Christopher Marlowe himself.
Nor was this an isolated instance of corrupt practice on
the part of the younger Richard in the administration of
his father’s estate. An application against him for fraudu-
lent dealing was brought in the Court of Requests by
Thomas Cell of Hopton in Derbyshire in November 1590,
and he was ordered to appear to answer the complaint
under a penalty of /^loo. The sequel is unknown.

Thus the character and situation of Richard Baines the
younger suit the part of an informer. He belonged to
a family that had an aptitude for being mixed up with
the shadier sides of legal affairs. His father had been a
troublesome, clamorous, and wilful vexer of divers of Her
Majesty’s subjects (Star Chamber, B. 28/14); his uncle,
Roger Woodrup, was suspected by Sir Francis Walsingham
of ‘synyster practyzes’. He himself had been in trouble
with the authorities and was familiar with Privy Council
procedure. When they summoned the ‘atheist’ Marlowe
before them, he may well have seen an opportunity of
fishing in troubled waters and turning the affair to his
own advantage. He speaks as one whose identity is known,

4427 K k

2S0 MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS

‘as I Richard Baines will justify and approve both by mine
oth and the testimony of many honest men’.

It is uncertain when exactly Baines handed in his Note.
The original document, presumably in his own hand, is
undated.* But a copy ‘as sent to her Highness’,^ the
Queen — a proof of the importance attached to it by the
authorities — after reproducing, with a slight variant, the
heading in the Note, scores it through and substitutes,
‘A Note deliuered on Whitsun eve last of the most horrible
blasphemes vtteryd by Cristofer Marly who within iii
dayes after came to a soden and fearful! end of his life.’
As Whitsun Eve in 1593 was on 2 June and as Marlowe
was killed on 30 May, he did not die three days after the
delivery of the Note. If the scribe meant this he was
mistaken either as to the date of delivery or of the
dramatist’s death. The words might mean that Marlowe
died within three days of uttering the blasphemies. But
Baines is evidently not referring to his utterances on only
one occasion. If he really delivered the Note on 2 June
he cannot have known of Marlowe’s death on 30 May,
and in that case must have been sorely disappointed to
find later that his labours as an informer were wasted and
presumably unrewarded.

Yet the biographers of Marlowe owe him a debt for
enabling his charges to be compared with those of Kyd
and for supplying links with other figures in the dramatist’s
circle. There is nothing in the Note to indicate that
Baines knew Marlowe personally. The accusations are
such as might be made by any one moving in London
Bohemian circles and collecting the gossip current there.
They are jotted down in confused order, but they may be
grouped under various heads.

There is the general charge that he is a propagandist of
atheistic views: ‘almost into every Company he cometh
he perswades men to Atheism willing them not to be
afeard of bugbears and hobgoblins’ ; and asserting ‘that the
first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe’.

* Harl. MSS. 6848, IT. 185-6. ^ Harl. MSS. 6853, ff. 307-8.

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The opening and closing sections of Richard Baines’s Note denouncing
Marlowe’s opinions on religion

RICHARD BAINES’S NOTE 251

Then come his sceptical views about the Old Testa-
ment and Moses, beginning with the heresy ‘that the
Indians and many Authors of antiquity have assuredly
written of aboue 16 thousand yeares agone wheras Adam
is proued to haue lived within 6 thowsand y ceres’. This
view, as has been seen,^ originated with Harriot, and it
is noticeable that the Note continues: ‘He affirmeth that
Moyses was but a Jugler and that one Heriots being
Sir W. Raleigh’s man^ Can do more then he.’ Then
follow instances of the crafty ways in which Moses im-
posed upon the Jews.

But the attack on the Old Testament is mild compared
with that on the New, which is ‘all . . . filthily written’
and with the revolting allegations against Christ and St.
John, where Baines develops with brutal frankness what
had been more briefly and hesitatingly set forth by Kyd.
There is attributed to Marlowe, as in Kyd’s second letter,
a gibe at St. Paul who alone among the apostles ‘had wit,
but he was a timerous fellow in bidding men to be subiect
to magistrates against his conscience’.

Here Baines adroitly mingles religious and political
heterodoxy as also implicitly in the item among the
dramatist’s opinions:

‘That if there be any god or any good Religion then it is in the
papistes because the service of god is performed with more
Ceremonies, as Elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, Shaven
Crownes & etc. That all protestantes are Hypocriticall asses.’

And he passes to a purely political and treasonable
charge when he puts into Marlowe’s mouth the state-
ment :

‘That he had as good right to coine as the Queen of England,
and that he was acquainted with one Poole a prisoner in Newgate
who hath greate skill in mixture of metalls and hauing learned
some thinges of him he ment through help of a Cunningc stamp
maker to Coin ffrench Crownes pistoletes and English shillinges.’

* See above, pp. 1 14.

^ The words ‘being Sir W. Raleighs man’ are omitted in the copy sent
to the Queen, to spare her susceptibilities.

252 MARLOWE’S ACCUSERS

This ‘one Poole’, it has been seen,* was John Poole, a
coiner whose acquaintance Marlowe had made in New-
gate during his fortnight’s imprisonment after the fatal
Bradley affray. Here at any rate Baines was partly speak-
ing by the book, and we cannot therefore dismiss his whole
Note as a mere set of malicious fabrications. But before
discussing further the question of Marlowe’s ‘atheism’,
there are two other names mentioned by Baines that have
to be taken into consideration. One is Richard Chomley
who ‘hath Confessed that he was perswaded by Marloe’s
Reasons to become an Atheist’. The other is Sir Walter
Raleigh who is named in the Note only as Thomas
Harriot’s employer but who, on the authority of Robert
Parsons, was known as the head of a school of atheism
that held its meetings in his house.

* See above, p. 104.

THE ‘ATHEISM’ OF CHOMLEY, RALEIGH,
AND MARLOWE

I N his Note Baines spoke vaguely of one Richard
Chomley, but the Government knew well who was
meant. It is significant that against his name in the copy
made for the Queen there is a marginal note in another
hand, ^he is layd for’, i.e. steps are being taken to arrest
him. From ^Remembraunces of wordes and matter against
Richard Cholmeley’ (Harl. MSS. 6848, f. 190) it is clear
that he had been in the service of the Crown, for it is
alleged that ‘being imployed by some of her Maicsties
prevy Counsaile for the apprehenson of Papistes, and
other daungerous men, hee vsed, as he saieth, to take
money of them and would lett them pass in spighte of
the Counsell’. He is probably the Chomley twice men-
tioned, though unfortunately without his Christian name,
in the proceedings of the Privy Council in 1591. On 13
May a warrant was issued to John Slater, one of the
Messengers of Her Majesty’s Chamber ‘to repaire vnto
the dwelling places of Mr. Thomas Drurie, — Roen, one
of the Messaungers of her Majesties Chamber, & of Mr.
— Chomley, companions of the said Drurie, or to anie
other place or places whersoever, for the apprehending
and bringing them before their Lordships without delay,
al excuses set apart, to answeare to such things as shalbc
objected against them’. On 29 July there was another
warrant ‘to paie to one Burrage and Chomeley that ap-
prehended Thomas Drewry, vi*'’. The combination of the
names in the two warrants can scarcely be a mere coinci-
dence. It looks as if Chomley had turned against Drury,
and helped the Privy Council to secure his arrest. Then,
perhaps dissatisfied by the reward for this or later services,
he had proved false to his employers. It is declared in the
‘Remembraunces’ that ‘he speaketh in generall all euill of

THE ‘ATHEISM’ OF

254

the Counsell; saying that they are all Athiestes and
Machiavillians’ ; and that ‘he hath certain men corrupted
by his persuasions, who wilbe ready at all times and for
all causes to swear whatsoever seemeth good to him.
Amonge whom is one Henry Younge and Jasper Borage
and others.’ This Borage must be the ‘Burrage’ of the
warrant of 29 July. He, too, seems to have turned against
the Government for in an endorsement he is labelled
‘dangerous’, while Young is described as ‘taken and made
an instrument to take the rest’, i.e. had turned Queen’s
evidence. He was the son of a Kentish gentleman, and
had offered to kill Elizabeth.*

In another document (Harl. MSS. 6848, f. 191) a
Government informer, who was acting as an age 7 it-provo-
cateuTy goes into more detail about a treasonable conspiracy
that Chomley was organizing:

‘Yesterday hee sente two of his companions to mee to knowe if
I would ioyne with him in familiaritie, and bee one of their dampn-
able crue. I sothed the villaynes with faire wordes in their follies
because I would thereby dive into the secretes of their develishe
hartes, that I mightc the better bewray their purposes to drawc
her Maiesties subiectes to bee Athiestes. Their practise is after her
Maiesties decease to make a Kinge amonge themselues and Hue
accordinge to their owne lawes, and this saieth Cholmelcy willbee
done easely, because they bee and shortely wilbe by his and his
felowes persuasions as many of their opynion as of any other religion.

He then proceeds to accuse Chomley of blasphemies
similar to those attributed by Baines to Marlowe, as that
‘Moyses was a Jugler & Aaron a Cosener’. Treason and
‘atheism’ were, as usual, linked by the informer.

Both these documents are undated, but at the Privy
Council held on 19 March 1593 a warrant was issued to
George Cobham, one of the Messengers of Her Majesty’s
Chamber, ‘to apprehende Richarde Chomeley and Richarde
Stronge and to bringe them before their Lordships’. The
Government were warned by their agent that the arrest

* Ethel Seaton, ‘Marlowe, Poley, and The Tippings’ (R.E.S., July 1929).

CHOMLEY, RALEIGH, AND MARLOWE 255

would be no easy matter. ‘This cursed Cholmeley hath
60 of his company and hee is seldome from his felowes and
therefore I beeseech your worship haue a special care of
your selfe in apprehending him, for they be resolute
murdering myndes.’ This may explain the fact that it
was more than three months before he was apprehended,
and then not by Cobham. On 29 June Justice Young
wrote to Sir John Puckering (Harl. MSS. 7002, f. 10) to
‘advartise^ him ‘that yestar night, at ix of the clokc, Mr.
Wilbrom came to me and brought Richard Chomlcy with
him; he did submet hym selfe to hym’. Young further
states that he has committed Chomley to prison, and that
‘Chomley sayd vnto my men as he was goyng to preson,
that he did kno the Law, that when it came to pase, he
cold shefte will ynowgh’.

But as Danchin has shown, he appears to have been
saved by the intervention of the Earl of Essex, who on
13 November wrote to Sir E. Littleton, Sir E. Aston, and
R. Bagot, thanking them for their trouble in the matter
of his servant Chomley, and asking for its continuance
that his innocency may be established.^

Chomley’s ultimate fate is uncertain, but his chief im-
portance to Marlovian biography lies in the fact that
through him we get the only direct contemporary testi-
mony to the dramatist’s personal association with Raleigh.
Both Kyd and Baines had borne witness to Marlowe’s
intimacy with Harriot, but to know the ‘man’ of an
Elizabethan nobleman was not necessarily to be familiar
with his ‘lord’. Kyd had asserted that his own lord could
not endure Marlowe’s name or sight. But one of the
charges against Chomley in ‘the Remembraunces of words
and matter’ is that

‘Hee saieth & verely beleueth that one Marlowe is able to shewe
more sounde reasons for Atheisme then any devine in Englande is
able to geue to prove devinitie & that Marloe tolde him that hee
hath read the Atheist lecture to S*" Walter Raliegh & others.’

* Historical MSS. Commission, 4th Report, p. 330, quoted by Danchin,
Revue Germaniquey Jan.-Feb. 1914.

THE ‘ATHEISM’ OF

256

This ‘lecture’ can scarcely have been the treatise by
‘the late Arrian’, part of which was found in Kyd’s pos-
session. This was, as we now know, a transcript of a
document dating back nearly half a century, and it had
not been in Marlowe’s hands for about two years. The
lecture may have been part of the unprintable book which,
according to Simon Aldrich, Marlowe wrote against the
Scriptures.^ Baines may have been referring to it when
he alleged that Marlowe ‘hath quoted a number of con-
trarieties oute of the Scriptures which he hath given to
some great men who in convenient time shalbe named.’
Unfortunately for us the ‘convenient time’ was never to
come, and thus Chomley remains our only witness to
personal intercourse between Sir Walter and the drama-
tist. We arc not warranted on this slender basis to assume
that there was such a familiarity between them as the
dedication of Lucrece suggests between Southampton and
Shakespeare. Yet there can be little doubt that when
Baines spoke of ‘some great men’ he had Raleigh chiefly in
mind. And it has been aptly pointed out that Sir Walter
himself wrote, ‘To believe what all men say of the same
thing is not, possible; for then we shall believe con-
trarieties’.^

In any case when on ‘one Wednesdaye sevenight before
the Assizes’, in the summer of 1593, probably within a
month or two after Marlowe’s death on 30 May, Sir
Walter Raleigh, his half-brother Carew Raleigh, Sir Ralph
Horsey, Ralph Ironside, minister of Winterbottom, and
others, met at the tables of Sir George Trenchard, at
Wolverton, and when towards the end of supper a disputa-
tion arose on theological matters, there was no reference
to ‘the Atheist lecture’ or to Marlowe’s opinions. The
question of what the soul is having been posed by Carew,
Sir Walter asked Ironside to answer it for the benefit of the
company:

‘I have benn (sayeth he) a scholler some tyme in Oxeforde, I have

* See above, p. no.

^ M. C. Bradbrook, The School of Nighty p. 18.

CHOMLEY, RALEIGH, AND MARLOWE 257

aunswered vnder a Bachelor of Arte & had taulke with diuines, yet
heithervnto in this pointe (to witt what the reasonable soule of
man is) have I not by anye benne resolved. They tell vs it is primus
motor the first mover in a man &c.’

Ironside sought to satisfy Raleigh by quoting ‘the
generall definicion of Anima out of Aristotle 2" de Anima
cap: I®’, and thence deducing ‘the speciall definicion of
the soule reasonable’. But Sir Walter, in this respect no
true ‘Clerk of Oxenford’, repudiated the Aristotelian
definition ‘as obscure & intricate’. Similarly, at a later
stage of the discussion, he was dissatisfied with the Aristo-
telian definition of God as ‘Ens Entium’, for ‘neither
coulde I lerne heitherto what god is’.

We have the best warrant for the accuracy of Ironside’s
account of this ‘disputation’. Not only was he giving his
testimony on oath before a Commission on Atheism held
at Cerne Abbas in March 1 594, but one of the Commis-
sioners, Sir Ralph Horsey, had been among the company
at Sir George Trenchard’s table and was thus in a position
to check the truth of his story. It was a grave scholastic
discussion with nothing of the iconoclastic and ribald
elements of the opinions attributed to Marlowe by Kyd
and Baines. It is significant of Raleigh’s conventional
practice, whatever his speculative opinions, that he ended
the dialogue by asking ‘that grace might be sayed ; for that,
quoth he, is better then this disputacion’.

In other depositions, however, before the Commission
we hear of a member of Sir Walter’s ‘retinew’, Thomas
Allen, Lieutenant of Portland Castle, who evidently had
something of the mocking humour of Marlowe. Different
witnesses declared that ‘he is greate blasphemer & leight
esteemer of Religion; and thereaboutes cometh not to
Devine service or sermons’ ; that he ‘did teare twoe Leaves
out of a Bible to drye Tobacco on’; that ‘when he was
like to dye, being perswaded to make himselfe reddye to
God for his soule’ he answered, ‘he woulde carrye his soule
vp to the topp of an hill, and runne god, runne devill,
fetch it that will have it’.

4427 l 1

258 THE ‘ATHEISM’ OF

Like master, like man, Allen had a servant, Oliver, who
walking home from church scandalized two ladies of the
congregation by coarse jeers against the morals of Moses,
whom he compared with Solomon.

Harriot’s heresies are mentioned by several of the de-
ponents, one of whom ‘hath harde that one Herriott
attendant on Sir Walter Rawleigh hath been convented
before the Lordes of the Counsell for denyinge the resur-
recion of the bodye’. There is no record of such an ap-
pearance of Harriot before the Privy Council. Nor, as
far as is known, were the examinations at Cerne followed
by any action against Raleigh or his friends.

Yet the depositions before the Commissioners may
furnish a clue to at any rate a partial solution of the
puzzling discrepancy between the sinister notoriety of
the ‘School of Atheism’ in popular opinion and the writ-
ings of two of its leading members, Raleigh and Marlowe.
It is evident that what had above all outraged contem-
porary orthodoxy was the attack by members of the School
on the verbal inspiration of the Bible, on what is now
known as ‘fundamentalism’. Protestantism having re-
jected an infallible Church in favour of an infallible Book
was horrified and alarmed by what seemed to be a con-
certed attack on w^hat it had thought to be an impregnable
Maginot line of defence. Nor was it only Protestantism
that took up its guard. It was a Jesuit that accused the
School of jesting at the Old and New Testaments, at
Moses and at Christ, in the meetings at Sir Walter’s house.^
So at Cerne, as has been seen, Allen, one of his followers,
is charged with the sacrilege of tearing leaves out of a
Bible, to dry the weed imported by his chief, which was
in no good repute; and Allen’s servant makes the matter
worse with scandal about Moses and Solomon. Harriot,
who had become a by-word for his heterodox views of
Biblical chronology, has now to answer for a reported
denial of the Scriptural doctrine of the resurrection of the
body. One of the counts against Richard Chomley was
* See above, p. 1 1 3,

CHOMLEY, RALEIGH, AND MARLOWE 259

that he made a jest of Scripture and that he called Moses
a juggler and Aaron a cosener.

It is evident that all this is in line with the details of
the indictment of Marlowe’s ‘atheism’ hy Kyd and Baines
and doubtless by Greene before Chettle bowdlerized his
manuscript. He, too, is accused of jesting at the divine
Scriptures, and of mocking at prophets and apostles as
jugglers, who maintained by their arts an ‘everlastinge
superstition’ in the minds of the people. Marlowe’s
genius, it has been seen, was strangely compounded of
analytic and imaginative elements. To the former the
‘contrarieties’ involved in the literal methods of Biblical
interpretation offered a challenge which he was quick to
accept. His method was one of sap and mine. Wherever
he went, as his accusers aver, in his ‘common speeches’,
his table talk, and otherwise he let loose his mordant wit
upon sacred subjects. In this respect he was a provocative,
propagandist, explosive force.

Did Marlowe’s ‘atheism’ culminate in the repulsive
blasphemies against Christ which Baines, in part supported
by Kyd, attributed to him? It is, of course, impossible to
say what may have dropped from the dramatist’s lips in
a ribald mood. But there is nothing in his writings that
can be matched with the coarse obscenities placed in his
mouth by the informers. These may have been a vul-
garized and poisoned version of Marlowe’s denial of the
divinity of Christ. The venomous exaggerations of Baines
seem to rest upon this as their basis, and the disputation
which passed from Marlowe to Kyd was a Socinian treatise.
It has indeed been argued that in Doctor Faustus ‘the
divinity of Christ is no longer in question’,^ when Faustus
is found at the end aspiring not after knowledge, but
salvation :

O, Fll leap up to my God! — Who pulls me down?

See, see where Christ’s blood streams i’ the firmament!

One drop would save my soul, half a drop: Ah, my Christ!

But the lines are, as I think, too dramatically appro-
* M. C. Bradbrook, op. cit., p. no.

26 o

THE ‘ATHEISM’ OF

priate on the lips of the agonized Doctor on the brink of
his doom to be pressed into the service of biography.

But on its negative side Marlowe’s revolt from ortho-
doxy went far beyond an assault on Biblical literalism and
denial of the Incarnation. While individual passages in
the plays must be taken in their particular context, the
general impression left by T amburlaine^ Part II y and The
Jew of Malta is that the dramatist was hostile to all forms
of institutional religion. The followers of Christ, of
Mahomet, and of Moses are in turn pilloried and held up
to scorn. And as between Catholicism and Protestantism
there seems little left to choose. Marlowe’s aesthetic
sensibilities may, as Baines alleged, have biased him in
favour of the ceremonial pomp of the orthodox ritual.
But the invective against the Papacy in almost identical
terms by the English king in Edward II and by Henry III
of France in The Massacre at Paris seems to have some-
thing of a personal ring, and in the latter play it is the
Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre, who shows to most
advantage.

So much for the destructive results of Marlowe’s rationa-
lizing intelligence. But neither he nor Raleigh, each in his
different way, of true Renaissance temper, could rest
in negatives alone. In the discussion round Sir George
Trenchard’s table on 30 May 1593 Sir Walter, though he
takes up a critical position towards the Aristotelian
definitions of the soul and of God, is as far as possible from
a ribald or flippant attitude. The more constructive and
positive side of his doctrine is to be found in his writings,
especially his two treatises. The Soul and The Sceptic,
These have recently been acutely discussed and analysed
in some detail.* What is important to emphasize here is
that the ‘atheist’ Raleigh, while recognizing the limita-
tions of human knowledge, affirms that the Soul is divine
in its origin and its aspiration:

‘Is it not a manifest argument that it cometh from God, seeing

* M. C. Bradbrook, op. cit., pp. 53-63. See also Miss Ellis- Fermor,
Christopher Marlowe, pp. 163-5.

CHOMLEY, RALEIGH, AND MARLOWE 261

in all things it resteth not till it come to God? The mind in
searching causes is never quiet till it come to God, and the will
never is satisfied with any good till it come to the immortal goodness.'*

This immortal goodness is elsewhere termed ‘an eternal
and infinite being’, and as all the rivers in the world after
‘divers risings and divers runnings’ fall at last into the
great ocean, ‘so after all the searches that human capacity
hath and after all philosophical contemplation and
curiosity, in the necessity of this infinite power, all the
reason of man ends and dissolves itself. ’ ^

In the opening words of his History of the World the
attributes of Deity are majestically set forth:

‘God, whom the wisest men acknowledge to be a power in-
effable and virtue infinite: a light by abundant clarity invisible;
an understanding which only itself can comprehend: an essence
eternal and spiritual, of absolute pureness and simplicity: was and
is pleased to make himself known by the work of the world.'

The soul created by such a power must be immortal,
and to this belief he clings in his last verse written on the
brink of ‘the dark and silent grave’ :

And from which Earth and Grave, and Dust,

The Lord shall raise me up I trust.

From a dramatist no such explicit statement can be
expected. But, as has been seen,^ there are passages in
T amburlainey Part II y which define the Godhead in terms
strikingly akin to those used by Raleigh (ii. ii. 49-54):

That he that sits on high and never sleeps.

Nor in one place is circumscriptible.

But everywhere fills every continent
With strange infusion of his sacred vigour.

May, in his endless power and purity.

Behold . . .

In these lines the Deity is conceived as both transcen-

* yi Treatise of the Soul in Sir W. Raleigh^ s W orks (Oxford, 1829), viii.

582.

* Preface to History of the World, op. cit., ii. xvii.

3 See above, p. 90.

262 THE ‘ATHEISM’ OF MARLOWE

dent and immanent ; it is the former aspect that is dwelt
on in V. i. 199-201 :

Seek out another Godhead to adore,

The God that sits in heaven, if any God,

For he is God alone, and none but he.

And banishment from his presence, as Mephistophilis
tells Faustus (i. iii. 79-82), is in itself damnation:

Think’st thou that 1 who saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being depriv’d of everlasting bjiss?

Here the ‘atheist’ Marlowe’s conception of heaven and
hell is more spiritual than that of the Puritan Milton in
Paradise Lost. Yet when Milton in Lycidas takes as his
standard the ‘perfect witness of all-judging Jove’, we
know that under the Olympian title he envisages the
Biblical deity. It is otherwise with Marlowe. When he
invokes God as Jupiter, the title is as significant to him
as any Scriptural designation. The cry, ‘Great Pan is
dead’, had never rung in his ears. He is like a visitor to
Rome in these days to whom the memorials of the Re-
public and the Empire speak more eloquently than the
glories of medieval and Renaissance churches. It was
through Rome, as has been seen, and not through Greece,
through Virgil and Ovid, not through Homer and the
Attic stage, that the vision of the classical world had been
opened to Marlowe. Yet by nature he was less ‘an antique
Roman’ than a Greek. Divinity was primarily revealed
to him in neither its Old nor its New Testament mani-
festations, as the All-Righteous or the All-Loving, but
under its Hellenic aspects of ideal beauty and ‘knowledge
infinite’. Faustus ‘confounds hell in Elysium’ and craves
that after death ‘his ghost be with the old philosophers’.
But of Marlowe himself it may be said that during his
lifetime his ‘ghost’ or spirit kept company with the old
philosophers, including among them the myth-makers of
the ancient world, and that what his contemporaries
called his atheism was largely a legacy from them.

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER XV 263

Lovers Labour Lost^ Willobie his Avisa, and ‘The School
of Atheism’

If credit is to be given to recent critical theories, i the assailants
of the ‘School of Atheism’ included the youthful dramatist,
William Shakespeare. His early play. Lovers Labour"* s Lost, ridiculing
the attempt to establish an ‘Academe’ in defiance of the natural
relation of the sexes, is full of references to blackness and to night,
including the lines (iv. hi. 250-1):

O paradox ! Black is the badge of hell

The hue of dungeons and the School of Night.

‘The School of Night’, it has been urged, is to be identified with
Raleigh’s ‘School of Atheism’. It was to Matthew Roydon, the
associate of Marlowe and of Harriot, and his own ‘dear and most
worthy friend’, that Chapman dedicated in 1594 work The
Shadow of the Night, which included a Hymnus in Noctem. Two
lines in the Hymnus \

No pen can anything eternal write

That is not steeped in humour of the Night

find a ‘ retorting challenge ’ in Berowne’s cry :

Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper’d with Love’s sighs.

Lovers Labour ’j Lost, it is contended, is a satire upon Raleigh’s
‘School’, and it is further suggested that it was written in 1593
for a private performance in the house of some grandee who
had opposed Raleigh and Raleigh’s men — possibly the Earl of
Southampton’s. If, however, this is the date of Lovers Labour ’j
Lost, Shakespeare could have seen Lhe Shadow of the Night only in
manuscript.

On the other hand, it has been maintained^ that a counterblast
came from the ‘School’ in the enigmatic poem, Willobie his A visa,
published in 1594. G. B. Harrison takes the view that both Henry
Willobie, the reputed author, and Hadrian Dorrell, who signs the
preface, are fictitious, and that the work is from the pen of
Matthew Roydon, to whose Astrophell it has points of close simi-

^ See the introduction to the New Cambridge edition of Love's Labour 's
Lost (1923).

* G. B. Harrison in the essay appended to his edition of Willobie, his
Avisa (1926), supported by M. C. Bradbrook (op. cit., pp. 168-71).

264 WILLOBIE HIS AVISA

larity. Harrison argues that Avisa, the heroine of the poem, was
born at Cerne Abbas and was the hostess of an inn in the neigh-
bouring town of Sherborne, where Raleigh had the lease of the
Abbey from January 1592. Avisa’s rejected suitor H. W. is to be
identified with Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, and his
friend W. S. with William Shakespeare. Moreover, from the
mention of Lucrece in the prefatory verses to Willobie his Avisa,
signed ‘ Vigilantius ; Dormitanus’, and the line ‘Let Lucres-Auis
be thy name’, Harrison concludes that the author intended Wil-
lobie his Avisa to be coupled in the reader’s mind with Shake-
speare’s Lucrece'* ,

This whole interpretation, except for the identification of W. S.
with Shakespeare, has been directly challenged by Leslie Hotson.*
He holds that the author was indeed the Henry Willobie (or
Willoughby) of West Knoyle, Wiltshire, who matriculated, as a
member of St. John’s College, Oxford, on 10 December 1591, at
the age of sixteen. A link has been found between him and
Shakespeare, for his elder brother, William, married a sister of
Katherine Bamfield, wife of Thomas Russell, whom the dramatist
was to appoint as one of the overseers of his will.

‘Vigilantius’ and ‘Dormitanus’ have also been given an Oxford
background. Hotson has ingeniously identified them with two
Balliol undergraduates, Robert Wakeman and Edward Napper,
aged eighteen and sixteen in 1 594. It would be gratifying to find
in my own college one of the earliest allusions to Shakespeare as
a poet. But if Hotson’s interpretation is correct, any association
between Willobie his Avisa and Raleigh’s ‘School’ must be given up,

* See 7, William Shakespeare Do Appoint Thomas Russell Esquire (1937),
PP- 53-70-

XVI

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

As Marlowe was at Deptford Strand by the tenth hour
jfxbefore noon on 30 May 1593, it looks as if he had not
returned to take up residence again at Scadbury after his
interview with the Privy Council. But it is remarkable
that of the four actors in the tragic event of that day the
three most important, Marlowe, Poley, and Ingram
Frizer, had been in intimate relation in different ways
with Thomas Walsingham. He had recently been Mar-
lowe’s host. Poley had been in close touch with him
during the Babington plot and later.* Frizer was in his
employ, and Nicholas Skeres, the fourth of the quartet,
had been in intimate association with Frizer and had
probably come into connexion with Poley at an earlier
date.^

Things seem to have gone well with Poley since his
release from the Tower in the autumn of 1588. He had
been taken back regularly into the Government service
from the last part of that year, and the Declared Accounts
of the Treasurer of the Chamber contain a series of pay-
ments to him ‘as an accredited messenger to and from
English ambassadors, state agents, and courts abroad. ^

The first entry is as follows :

To Robert Poolye gent vppon a warrant signed by Mr Secretary
Walsingham dated at the Courte xxvij”*® December 1588 for
bringinge lettres in poste for her majesties affaires from the King
of Denmark to the Courte at Richmonde — xv'*.

The second entry is of a payment on 8 July 1589, again
on Walsingham’s warrant, for the carrying of letters to
several places in Holland ‘and retourninge with like lettres

* See above, pp. 125 and 1 27. ^ See above, p. 125.

3 Robert Foley's Movements as a Messenger of the Court, 1558 to 1601,
by Eugenie de Kalb {R.E.8., Jan. 1933, pp. 13-18).

4427

M m

266 30 may 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

to the Courte againe — Thenceforth for a number
of years the warrants for payment are signed by ‘Mr vice-
chamberlane’, Sir Thomas Heneage. Four of them, on
23 February 1589/90, 20 May 1591, 20 December 1591,
and 23 June 1592 are to Poley for acting as messenger
with letters to and from the town of Berwick. Others on
23 July 1590, 22 December 1590, i March 1591/2, 3 Sep-
tember 1592, and 12 February 1592/3 are for similar
errands to various places in the Low Countries. One
dated at Oxford, 25 September 1592, shows that Poley
took letters to Dover and brought the answers to Oxford
while the Queen was being entertained by the University
at Christ Church.*

Another detailed entry is as follows :

‘To Roberte Poolye uppon a warrant signed by Mr vicechamber-
layne dated at Hampton Courte xvij*”® December 1592 for his
chardges & paynes in carryinge of lettres in postc for her heighnes
special! service of greate importance from Hampton Courte into
Scotlande to the Courte there, and for his attendaunce in that place
and service, and rydinge in sundrye places within that province by
the space of two whole monethes and for his retourne in the like
poste with lettres of aunswere to Hampton Courte agayne the
xiij^^ of December laste — xliij**.’

Poley was no stranger to Scotland. In 1586 Morgan
had written to Mary that he ‘hath bene heretofore to
Scotland & knoweth the best wayes to passe into Scot-
lande’. ^ The Government were now making full use of
his familiarity with that country, for after this two months’
excursion he soon paid two further visits to the court
there, for which he received payment on 6 January and
23 March 1592/3, the March visit being described as ‘for
her heighnes speciall and secret affayres of great im-
portaunce’.

It was about this time, according to Kyd, that Marlowe
had intended to resort to the King of Scots. But it is the

* Boas, University Drama in the Tudor Age, pp. 254 flP.

^ See above, p. 120,

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND 267

next of the entries concerning Poley that is of special
importance for the dramatist’s biography;

‘To Robert Poolye upon a warrant signed by Mr vicechamber-
layne dated at the Courte die Junij 1593 for cariyinge of
lettres in poste for her Majesties special! and secrete afaires of
great ymportaunce from the Courte at Croyden the viij^^ of Maye
1593 into the Lowe Countryes to the towne of the Hage in
HoUande, and for retourninge backe againe with lettres of aunswere
to the Courte at Nonesuche the viij^*' of June 1593 being in her
majesties service aU the aforesaid tyme-.-xxx*.’

It will be seen that Poley’s period of service covered by
the warrant, from 8 May to 8 June, includes 30 May and
I June. The significance of this will be discussed below.

Additional evidence of Poley’s official employment after
his release from the Tower is furnished by his ciphers used
in correspondence with the authorities. Three sets of
these (two of them in duplicate) have been identified by
Ethel Seaton.^ One is of uncertain date, another belongs
to 1596-7, and a third has been assigned to 1 590-1. The
inclusion in the heading of this set of some Flemish names
and addresses in Antwerp fits in with the evidence from
payment warrants of Poley’s activities during these years
in the Low Countries.

There is further evidence in the deposition of one
Robert Rutkin, broker, dated probably April 1591, which
is obscure in some of its references, but which shows Poley
as an agent for Sir Thomas Heneage in affairs relating to
the Low Countries :

‘Robert Rutkin broker saieth that the party who wrote the lettres
vnto him by the name of Bar[nard] Riche is Michaell Moody who
liveth either at Brussels or Antwerpe. . . . The said Rutkin saieth
that his neighbour mencioned in the letter is one Poolye & that
he deliuereth him letters for Sir Thomas Henneage & sendeth
letters to him from Sir Thomas Henneage . . . the said Robert
Poolye lyveth in Shorditch.

* Robert Poley'* s Ciphers in R.E.S., April 1931. Miss Seaton gives the
references to these ciphers in State Papers lo6, vol. ii, in P.R.O., with lists
and a facsimile of one cipher.

268 30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

‘He was at the poste this time to loke for lettres from him but
had none & recyueth no lettres from him but that hee ac-
quanteth Sir Thomas Henneage withall. Hee was sent over by
Sir Thomas Henneage with letters to diuers persons about a yeare
past.’

About a year later Sir Robert Cecil, writing to Sir
Thomas, refers to an interview with Poley :

‘I haue reccauyd your lettre Sc I will shew it as occasion may
serue. I have spoken with Poly Sc find him no Foole. I do suspend
all tyll our meeting which I wish may be shortly.’

Nicholas Skeres, if the identification of him with
‘Skyrres’ is correct,’^ has already been seen in the company
of Poley on 2 August 1586, during the Babington plot.
He seems to have been the younger son of Nicholas Skeres,
senior, citizen and merchant-tailor, and a parishioner of
Allhallows the Less, who by his will, 9 September 1566,
left to his wife one-third of his estate, and to his sons,
Jerome and Nicholas, still in their minority, another
third. ^ It was evidently the same Jerome ‘Skyers’ of the
City of London, and Nicholas ‘Skyers’ of Furnival’s Inn
who, with Matthew Roydon of Thavies Inn, entered on
6 January 1581/2 into a bond to pay a London goldsmith,
Henry Banyster, £40 by the Feast of the Purification
(2 February) following. As Roydon’s name appears first,
Moore Smith, who discovered the document, suggests
that he was the debtor and the others his securities. ^ In
any case it is of interest to find a Nicholas Skeres associated
as early as 1581/2 with Marlowe’s friend, Roydon. But
it is almost impossible to identify this man of some sub-
stance with the ‘Nicholas Skeeres’ whom William Fleet-
wood, writing to Lord Burleigh on 7 July 1585, mentions
amongst a number of ‘maisterles men & cut-purses, whose
practice is to robbe Gentlemen’s chambers and Artificers’
shoppes in and about London’. Even if this is a different

* See above, p. 125.

^ E. Vine Hall, Testamentary Papers^ iii (1937), p. 25.

^ M.L.R., Jan. 1914.

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND 269

man, it is probably the more respectable Nicholas Skeres
of FurnivaFs Inn who was mixed up in the Babington
plot. The conspirators were, in different ways, men of
standing and, if he was a spy, the Government would not
have employed a man branded in the previous year by the
Recorder as a cut-purse. It is in favour of the spy theory
that in 1589 Nicholas Skeres was paid by the Government
for carrying important post between the Court and the
Earl of Essex.

It is in the same year that, through the investigations
of Leslie Hotson, we get our first information about
Ingram Frizer.

On 9 October 1589 he bought the Angel Inn, Basing-
stoke, for £120^ but sold it again within two months.
One of the vendors of the ‘AngeP entered at the same
time into an obligation to him for ^^240, but failed to
discharge the debt, and Frizer obtained a judgement
against him in Easter Term 1592. Here Frizer, styled ‘of
London, yeoman’ was the complainant, but another case,
in which he was defendant, is more informative. At a
date not earlier than June 1598 Anne Woodleff of Ayles-
bury, Bucks., and her son Drew complained to the Lord
Keeper concerning proceedings of Frizer ‘abut fyve years
now past’. Drew Woodleff had appealed to Nicholas
Skeres for financial help, as Roydon appears to have done
in 1581/2. Skeres had in turn approached Frizer, who
promised Drew assistance in return for a signed bond for
£60. But instead of ready money Frizer could only offer
‘a commoditie’ for which Drew ‘mightc have threescore
pounds (which was a certayne nomber of gunnes or greate
Iron peeces)’. Drew, who must have been a simpleton,
then asked Frizer to sell the guns on his behalf, and Frizer
came back with ‘only Thirtie pounds protestinge that that
was all that he coulde at that tyme gett’, but ‘in truthe
the saide peeces or gunnes were his owne & the xxx^‘ he
broughte his owne and never offered them to be soulde
at all but lett them remayne uppon Tower Hill’.

Moreover Drew alleged further chicanery. It was

270 30 MAY IS93 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

arranged that ‘Skeres shoulde contrarie to the truthe
affirme that he oughte to the said Fryser marks in
money & so procure your saide Orator to enter into Bonde
lykewyse ... to paie vnto him the saide twentie marks
protesting that when he the saide Fryser should Receive
the same at your Orators hand he would paie it vnto the
saide Skeres’.

This bond was duly sealed and delivered. Then as
Drew had not ‘of his and mothers estate’ enough to make
up the two sums of £ 6 o and 20 marks he was induced
‘in his then unwarie age’ to enter ‘into a statute of cc'‘
vnto a gentleman of good worshipp . . . the saide Fryser
his then Maister’.

The entry of this ‘statute’ Hotson discovered among
the Lord Chamberlain’s papers at the Record Office. On
29 June 1593 ‘Drew Woodlef of Peterley, Bucks., gentle-
man’, was bound to Thomas Walsingham of Chislehurst,
Kent, Esquire, in the sum of £200 to be paid by 25 July
1593. Thus the gentleman of good worship, Frizer’s
master, is proved to be Thomas Walsingham of Scadbury,
with whom Marlowe had been staying in the middle of
May.

If Frizer did not know Marlowe before, he then had
the opportunity of making his acquaintance. According
to the best informed of the contemporary narrators it was
he who asked the dramatist to the fateful meeting at
Eleanor Bull’s tavern in Deptford Strand on 30 May 1593.
‘One named Ingram . . . had inuited him thither to a
feast’. ^ Research has hitherto failed to identify this
Eleanor Bull, a widow, or the name of her tavern where
‘Marlowe, Frizer, Skeres, and Poley were together from
the tenth hour before noon.

What followed from that hour is told in the inquisition
on I June, returned by William Danby, Coroner of the
Household :

‘Prandebant & post prandium ibidem quieto modo insimul
fuerunt & ambulaverunt in gardinum pertinentem domui prae-
* William Vaughan in Golden Grove (1600).

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Inquisition taken at Deptford Strand, on i June 1593, concerning the death of Christcpcr Marlowe and returned into Chancery by William Danby, Coroner of the Household

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND 271

dicto vsque horam sextam post meridiem eiusdem diei & tunc
recesserunt a gardino praedicto in cameram praedictam & ibidem
insimul & pariter cenabant.*

After supper a quarrel arose about the payment of ‘le
recknynge’ between Frizer and ‘Morley’. The latter was
lying on a bed, and the former was sitting near it, with
his back towards it and with the front part of his body
towards the table. Poley and Skeres were sitting so close
to Frizer on either side of him that he could not take
flight. Whereupon ‘Morley’ ‘ex subito & ex malicia sua’
drew Frizer’s dagger, which he was wearing at his back,
and gave him two wounds in his head, two inches long
and a quarter deep. Frizer, pinned between Skeres and
Poley, ‘in sua defensione & saluacione vite sue’, struggled
to get back his own dagger, with which he inflicted on
his assailant

‘vnam plagam mortalem super dexterum oculum suum profundi-
tatis duorum policium & latitudinis vnius policis de qua quidem
plaga mortali praedictus Cristoferus Morley adtunc & ibidem
instanter obijt.’

Such was the account that was accepted by the Coroner’s
jury of sixteen men when the inquest was held on i June,
‘super visum corporis Cristoferis Morley ibidem iacentis
mortui & interfecti’. The body must have been buried
immediately after the inquest, for the Register of St.
Nicholas Church, Deptford, contains the entry under
Anno Dom, 1593, ‘Christopher Marlow, slaine by ffrancis
ffrezer; the of June’. A fortnight later, on 15 June,
a writ of certiorari was issued to summon the case into
Chancery. The Coroner Danby made his return, and a
Pardon was issued to Frizer on 28 June on the ground
that he slew Christopher Morley ‘in defensione ac salua-
cione vite sue’.

Such, on the face of it, is the tale contained in the legal
records. Are we justified in going behind them, and
questioning the truth of the jury’s verdict ?

Since Hotson’s discovery in 1925 of the inquest

272 30 may 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

documents considerable fresh light has been thrown upon
the composition of the jury, especially from testamentary
sources. * Two of them, Nicholas Draper and Wolstan
Randall are distinguished in the inquest list as ‘generosi’.
Of Draper nothing further is known, but Randall in his
will of 18 February 1602/3 left among other bequests to
his wife the lease of a house, and of a stable belonging
to the Lord Admiral who had a house in Deptford.
William Curry, the third in the list, is not there called
‘generosus’ but he is ‘ of Deptford Strand, gentleman,’ in
his will, 16 April 1612, and he leaves to his wife his house,
wharf, and garden besides ^^loo, and to his son 200 marks.
John Barber is called ‘of Chatham, carpenter’, in his will
of 4 April 1608, but he seems to have lived previously in
Deptford, where he had houses and freelands which he
left to his son. Among the other jurors were Robert
Baldwyn, yeoman, of East Greenwich; Giles Field, grocer,
of Deptford; George Halfpenny, baker, of Limehouse;
James Batt, husbandman, of Lewisham; Thomas Batt,
senior, yeoman, of Bromley, Kent. All these left substan-
tial legacies in houses, goods, or farm animals. Two other
jurors, Henry Awger and Henry Dabyns (Dobbins) have
been identified^ as a manorial tenant and a baker.

It is a varied picture. The jury was evidently not packed
from men in any one class, but included persons of sub-
stance in various stations of life. They were, it would
appear, capable of judging evidence and not likely to be
browbeaten. And from the inquisition it would appear
that they did not perform their duty perfunctorily. They
viewed the body and took measurements of the fatal
wound over the right eye as also of the wounds in Frizer’s
head. They inquired into the proceedings of the whole
day — the meeting at ten o’clock, the dinner, the subse-
quent quiet conference and the walk, and the supper at
six in the afternoon. They reconstructed in detail the
fatal affray that followed.

* Specially by E. Vine Hall, op. cit., pp. 5--14.

^ By J. W. Kirby in T.L.S., 17 July 1930.

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND 273

But were they prejudiced against a playwright notorious
as an atheist, and recently arrested by order of the Privy
Council, or were they misled by false evidence? It
would be easier to answer if we had the individual
depositions as in the examinations before the Recorder
concerning Poley and Mistress Yeomans. There not only
Yeomans and Ede gave evidence but household servants.
Did the Coroner ask for testimony from Eleanor Bull or
any of the tavern tapsters? And by which of the princi-
pal witnesses were he and the jury most influenced?
Here, I think, we are now in a position to make things
somewhat clearer than when Hotson made his dis-
coveries.

Frizer appears to have been a man of some substance,
and his shady relations with the Woodleffs were probably
not known at this time. But he does not seem to have held
any public position before June 1593, and appearing in
the Coroner’s Court, with his unhealed two-day-old
wounds, he was virtually himself on trial for murder.
Skeres seems to have had an equivocal career and played
subordinate parts. Poley, as has been seen, had spent
much time in prison, but he was no ordinary rogue. He
had been mixed up in great affairs, and had been on
familiar terms with political personages and men of high
station. He had been in the confidence of Christopher
Blunt and the Sidneys ; he had talked with Morgan through
the windows of the Bastille; he had supped with Anthony
Babington before the break-up of the conspiracy; he had
(according to his own account) made Mr. Secretary look
out of his window and grin like a dog. And we have his
own avowal, reported by Yeomans at an earlier date,
T will sweare and forsweare my selfe rather then I will
accuse my selffe to doe me any harme’. It is, I think, a safe
inference that (whatever the actual facts may have been)
it was mainly the evidence of Poley that got Frizer off
and branded Marlowe as the criminal.

The position of the participants in the affray, as
described in the Coroner’s ‘return’, has been sharply
4427

N n

274 30 may 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

criticized, particularl7 hy Miss de Kalb 21 May

1925):

‘Marlowe (says the evidence) snatches a dagger from the rear of
Friser^s belt and deals him two futile flesh-wounds on the head:
such insignificant cuts (on the evidence) as might be self-inflicted
to corroborate a put-up story; or such as a man, fighting for his
life against heavy odds, might get in, slashing wildly, before he
was overpowered. But is it conceivable that any man in mortal
earnest would recline on a bed to hack at an antagonist who is
sitting upright and certain to retaliate? Friser, though seated
between Poley and Skeres “so that he could not in any wise get
away’’, is able to grapple with Marlowe, who is behind him on the
bed, to struggle with him for the dagger, and to give him a mortal
wound — and this without interference from the two other men
who (apparently) waited passive. These two inactive observers
were exceedingly competent to keep Friser within the reach of
Marlowe; but as for separating them no such reasonable effort is
recorded.’

In the same number of T,L.S. William Poel dealt, to the
same effect, with a special aspect of the struggle :

‘Marlowe could not have inflicted two wounds on Frizer’s head
“of the length of two inches and of the depth of a quarter of an
inch” with either the point or edge of a dagger. Captain Hutton
in his book on “Elizabethan Combats” has shown that when
quarrels arose it was not unusual for a man to draw his dagger and
with the handle pummel the head or shoulders of his adversary in
order to hurt him without danger to his life. Frizer’s scalp- wounds
can only be explained in this way. But the blow that slew Marlowe
must have been given with terrific force by a man intent on killing
his victim, because the blade, where it was one inch wide, pene-
trated Marlowe’s brain to a depth of two inches! Yet Frizer
declares that when he gave his blow he was seated between Skeres
and Poley “and that he could not in any wise get away in his own
defence”. But what his companions had to say on this matter we
are not told, and these men seem to have been the associates of
Frizer.’

Another point has been pressed from the medical angle
by Samuel Tannenbaum:

‘One who knows the anatomy and pathology of the human brain
knows that it is impossible for death to follow immediately upon

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND 275

the infliction of [a two-inch wound above the eye.] .... To have
caused instant death, the assassin would have had to thrust his
dagger horizontally into Marlowe’s brain to a depth of six or seven
inches — and that could not have happened if Frizer and Marlowe
had been wrestling as the witnesses described.

On grounds such as these it has been argued that the
story told to the Coroner and jury, and accepted by them,
was faked, and that Marlowe, instead of being the aggres-
sor in the affray, was the victim of a deliberately planned
political murder. The length and privacy of the con-
ference between the quartet savour of something weightier
than an ordinary Teast’ in a tavern. And there is a suspi-
cious similarity between the setting of the Deptford
episodes and an incident in the Babington conspiracy
when a number of the plotters, including Skeres, might
have been taken ‘at supper in Foley’s garden’, probably
the Garden Inn near Fleet Street. ‘It was evidently un-
healthy’, as Miss Seaton caustically remarks, ‘to frequent
an inn or to walk in its garden in Foley’s company, as
Marlowe was to know too late’.^

And there is documentary proof that as in August 1586
so in May 1593 Foley was in the service of Elizabeth’s
government. The warrant of 12 June 1593, quoted above,
shows that on 8 May he had left Croydon for The Hague
with official dispatches and that on 8 June he had brought
the answers to the Court at Nonesuch, ‘being in her
majesties service all the aforesaid tyme’. This unusual
formula, as Miss de Kalb has noted,^ was intended to
cover his employment during the whole month between
8 May and 8 June, when instead of carrying back the
answering dispatches of the States-General straight to the
Court, he had broken his return journey to meet Marlowe
at Deptford. The Government was at any rate deter-
mined that he should not suffer in any way as a conse-
quence of the fatality of 30 May.

* The Assassination of Christopher Marlowe, pp. 41-2.

^ ‘Marlowe, Robert Poley, and the Tippings’ in R.E.S., p. 280.

3 Loc. cit., in R.E,S., pp. 13-14.

276 30 may IS93 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

But does this mean that he was acting as their agent in
luring Marlowe to his doom? Pole/ would have had no
scruples about playing such a part. But why should the
Privy Council have taken such a roundabout way of getting
rid of the atheist playwright? He had been arrested and
bound over, and they could have dealt with him judicially
as they had already done with his fellow dramatist,
Thomas Kyd. Still less probable is the theory that the
trio at Deptford were tools of Raleigh who was afraid that
Marlowe would make revelations to the Council that
would incriminate him and his school of atheism.^ Poley
would certainly not have risked the loss of his government
employment by loitering on his way to Nonesuch in order
to carry out a criminal plot of Sir Walter’s. And if Frizer
had been the actual instrument of such a design, could
he have remained for years afterwards in the service of
Thomas Walsingham, Marlowe’s friend?

While, therefore, the theory of a political murder cannot
be ruled out, it is difficult to find an adequate motive for
it or to trace a convincing origin for it in any special
quarter. On the other hand, sudden and violent quarrels
over the settlement of accounts have been familiar in all
periods. And as in the record of the Bradley homicide,^
so here the introduction of an English phrase into the
legal Latin seems to come from the very lips of one of the
deponents :

‘post cenam praedicti Ingramus & Cristoferus Morley locati fuerunt
& publicauerunt vnus eorum alter! diuersa maliciosa verba pro eo
quod concordare & agreare non potuerunt circa solucionem denari-
orum summe vocatum le recknynge.’

Moreover, the condemnatory phrases in the Coroner’s
return, ‘ira motus versus praefatum Ingramum ffrysar’ . . .
‘ex subito & ex malicia sua . . , pugionem maliciose adtunc
& ibidem evaginabat’ tally remarkably with the descrip-
tion of Marlowe by Kyd in his letters to Puckering : ‘As
I & many others in regard of his other rashnes in attempt-

^ Samuel Tannenbaum, op, cit., pp. 48 ff. * See above, p. 102.

Extract from the Register of the Church of St. Nicholas, Deptford, including, among the burial entries for 1593,
‘Christopher Marlow slaine hy ffrancis ffrezer; the * 1 * of June’

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND 277

ing soden pryvie iniuries to men did ouerslypp though
often reprehend him for it.’ Was the assault on Frizer,
without warning and from behind, the crowning and
final instance of Marlowe’s ‘rashness in attempting soden
pryvie iniuries to men’ ? There are so many complicating
factors in the whole affair that we do best to suspend
judgement, remembering that coroners’ findings have
given cause for criticism ever since the Elsinore grave-
diggers discussed the rights and wrongs of Ophelia’s
Christian burial.

2nd Clown, But is this law?

1 st Clown, Ay, marry is’t; crowner’s quest law.

There is evidence, as will appear in the next chapter,
that the three companions of Marlowe on the day of his
death survived into the next century, and one of them at
least, Ingram Frizer, into the reign of Charles I. The
circumstances of the affair, in the official version, must
have been known to a considerable body of people — the
Coroner and the sixteen jurymen, the officials of the
Court of Chancery through whose hands the legal docu-
ments concerning the inquest and the pardon passed, the
households of Eleanor Bull and the Walsinghams. It is
therefore surprising that the references to the event in
the years immediately following should be so compara-
tively scanty and so curiously vague or misleading.
Mistakes began on the very day of the inquest, when the
entry of Marlowe’s burial in the St. Nicholas Church
Register gives the Christian name of his slayer, ‘ffrezer’,
as ‘ffrancis’ instead of Ingram. Nor is there any indication
in the churchyard of the place of the grave.

In the copy of Richard Baines’s Note concerning Mar-
lowe’s blasphemies sent to the Queen, as has been men-
tioned above, ^ the original title is scored through and
altered to ‘A Note deliuered on Whitson eve last of the
most horrible blasphemes vtteryd by Cristofer Marly who
within iii days after came to a soden & fearfull end of his

* See p. 250,

278 30 may 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

life’. Apart from the difficulty of dates already discussed,
the official scribe here is tantalizingly vague; his phrase
would cover any form of accidental death.

Thomas Kyd’s letters to Sir John Puckering were
written after (probably soon after) Marlowe had met his
fate, for he says, Tt is not to be nombred amongst the
best conditions of men, to taxe or to opbraide the deade’.
Kyd paints Marlowe in the darkest colours, but he gives
no hint that he had brought on his own doom by an un-
provoked assault, though, as has been seen, the words ‘his
other rashnes in attempting soden pryvie iniuries to men’
might well cover the Deptford stabbing affair. Another
contemporary playwright and poet, George Peele, uses
common form when in the Prologue to the Honour of the
Garter^ published in 1593, he apostrophizes ‘Marley’ as
‘unhappy in thine end’.

And strangest of all, the only contemporary who ap-
pears to allude in the same year with any particularity to
the playwright’s death is completely mi^eading. Gabriel
Harvey had come up to London in August 1592 to attend
to legal affairs concerning the estate of his brother John
who had died in July. He stayed in London, apparently
at the house of his printer John Wolf in St. Paul’s
Churchyard till towards the end of July 1593. Marlowe’s
tragic fate must have caused consternation in ‘Paul’s’,
where, as Kyd tells us, he had friends. Moreover, another
brother of Gabriel Harvey, Richard, had been Rector of
Chislehurst since 1586^ and therefore in touch with the
Walsingham household. Gabriel Harvey was thus in a
position to get accurate information from more than one
source. Yet, to all appearance, he labours, for edifying
purposes, the circumstance that Marlowe died of the
Plague, which was rife in 1593! A poetical epilogue to
A New Letter of Notable Contents^ addressed to Wolf and

* He had been collated on i Oct. 1586, and again on 6 Dec. He was
licensed to preach on 18 Sept. 1587. Marlowe would appear to have heard
him on a visit to Scadbury, for he is reported to have called him an ass,
fit to preach about nothing but the iron age.

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND 279

dated from Saffron Walden, 18 September 1593, begins
with a sonnet on ^ Gorgon^ or the Wonderfull yeare’. This
records leading events of ^the fatall yeare of yeares . . .
Ninety Three’, and ends the recital with ‘Weepe Powles,
thy T amberlaine voutsafes to dye’. The Tamberlaine of
Towles’ who died in 1593 must be Marlowe. What then
is to be made of the last section of the Epilogue, the
‘Glosse’?

Is it a Dreame? or is the Highest minde
That euer haunted Powles or hunted winde,

Bereaft of that same sky-surmounting breath.

That breath that taught the Tempany to swell.

He & the Plague contended for the game.

The hawty man extolles his hideous thoughtes,

And gloriously insultes upon poore soules,

That plague themsealves : for faint harts plague themselves

The graund Dissease disdain’d his toade Conceit
And smiling at his tamberlaine contempt,

Sternely struck-home the peremptory stroke,

He that nor feared God, nor dreaded Diu’ll,

Nor ought admired but his wondrous selfe . . .

Alas! but Babell Pride must kisse the pitt.

It might be possible to wrest some other meaning out
of part of this, but ‘The graund Dissease . . . sternely
struck-home the peremptory stroke’ must surely imply
Marlowe’s death from the plague. Yet the real fact of his
instantaneous death-wound from Frizer’s dagger would
have been far more impressive, as a moral warning, than
his demise from the pestilence that carried off its thousands
without discrimination. The more Harvey’s references are
considered the more enigmatic they become.*

Not so with the next known account of the event, by
Thomas Beard, in his Theatre of Gods Judgements ^ chap.
XXV (1597). The work is a translation from the French,

* Hale Moore in an article on ‘Gabriel Harvey’s References to Marlowe’
{Studies in Philology, July 1926) throws light on incidental points, but
does not help to soIvq the basic problem,

280 30 may 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

illustrating ‘the admirable Judgements of God upon the
transgressours of his commandements’. Among the three
hundred additional examples with which Beard augmented
his version was the divine punishment of ‘one of our own
nation, of fresh and late memory, called Marling of whose
atheism he gives the conventional account, and then
continues :

‘It so fell out that in London streets as he purposed to stab one
whome hee ought a grudge vnto with his dagger, the other party
perceiuing so auoided the stroke, that withall catching hold of his
wrest, he stabbed his owne dagger into his owne head, in such sort,
that notwithstanding all the meanes of surgerie that could be
wrought, hee shortly after died thereof . . . and together with his
breath an oath flew out of his mouth.* . . . But herein did the
iustice of God most notably appeare, in that he compelled his owne
hand which had written those blasphemies to be the instrument
to punish him, and that in his braine, which had deuised the same.’

This is, at any rate, an effective piece of ‘tendencious’
narrative. It was necessary for Beard’s purpose that Mar-
lowe’s own hand should be the instrument of his death,
without it being a case of suicide. And though he thus
gives a twist to the facts he knew not only that Marlowe
was killed in a brawl, but that the two combatants made
use of the same dagger — a very unusual circumstance.
And if Hotson is right in his ingenious conjecture that
‘London streets’ is a printer’s error for ‘London streete’,
a thoroughfare in East Greenwich (Deptford being West
Greenwich), Beard got within ‘a few hundred yards’ of
the actual scene of Marlowe’s death.

But in the next year, 1 598, Francis Meres in his Palladis
Tamia supplemented Beard’s account, to which he refers
his readers, with highly coloured details :

‘As the poet Lycophron was shot to death by a certain riual of
his : so Christopher Marlow was stabd to death by a bawdy seruing
man, a riuall of his in his lewde love.’

* Aldrich was probably echoing Beard^s account when he told Oxinden
that Marlowe ‘was stabd with a dagger and dyed swearing’. Other versions
derived from Beard are quoted by Bakeless, op. cit., pp. 235-6.

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND 281

Here Meres’s obsession with parallels, which dominates
his tractate, works more mischief than Beard’s theological
fanaticism. Frizer, though in the service of Thomas
Walsingham, was not a ‘seruing man’, and ‘le recknynge’,
not ‘lewde love’, was the accepted cause of the affray. The
further flourishes that Anthony Wood and later writers
have added to the rodomontade of Meres are well known. ^
But in 1600 William Vaughan, drawing evidently upon
independent information, gave in his Golden Grove an
account that in many respects hit the mark:

‘It so hapned that at Detford, a little village about three miles
distant from London, as he meant to stab with his ponyard one
named Ingram, that had inuited him thither to a feast, and was
then playing at tables, he quickly perceyuing it, so auoyded the
thrust, that withall drawing out his dagger for his defence hee
stabd this Marlow into the eye, in such sort, that his braines
comming out at the daggers point, hee shortlie after dyed.’

Vaughan, of course, goes wrong in stating that two
weapons were used, but this proves that his account is
not based upon the Coroner’s inquisition, and that it
therefore has independent value. Hence it is important
that he should be right about the place of the affray and
the identity of Marlowe’s slayer — ^whom he calls, after a
fashion of the time, by his Christian name only. The two
details that Ingram Frizer was the host at the entertain-
ment, and that he was playing at tables [i.e. backgammon]
are not inconsistent with the legal record, and may be
correct. At any rate there was no need to insert them to
point the moral, which Vaughan, like Beard, was anxious
to enforce ; ‘Thus did God, the true executioner of diuine
iustice, worke the ende of impious Atheists.’

But those who were making theological capital out of
the playwright’s death did not have it all their own way.
In the light of the facts, as we now know them, of the
fatal affray on 30 May 1593, Blount’s dedication of his

* An entertaining summary of them is given by Philip Henderson,
in ^^And Morning in his Eyes'\ pp. 197-9.

282 30 may 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND

1598 edition of Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsing-
ham is a remarkable document:

^Sir, wee thinke not our selues discharged of the dutie wee owe
to our friend, when wee haue brought the breathlesse bodie to
the earth: for albeit the eye there taketh his euer farwell of that
beloued obiect, yet the impression of the man, that hath beene
deare vnto us, liuing an after life in our memory, there putteth vs
in mind of farther obsequies due vnto the deceased. And namely
[i.e. especially] of the performance of whatsoeuer we may iudge
shal make to his liuing credit, and to the effecting of his determina-
tions preuented by the stroke of death. By these meditations (as
by an intellectual will) I suppose my selfe executor to the vn-
happily deceased author of this Poem, vpon whom knowing that
in his life time you bestowed many kind fauors, entertaining the
parts of reckoning and woorth which you found in him, with good
countenance and liberall affection : I cannot but see so far into the
will of him dead, that whatsoeuer issue of his brain should chance
to come abroad, that the first breath it should take might be the
gentle aire of your liking: for since his selfe had been accustomed
thervnto, it would prooue more agreeable & thriuing to his right
children, than any other foster countenance whatsoeuer.’

Who would dream that behind the bland and unctuous
phrases of this dedication there lay the story of Marlowe’s
sudden blow from behind at Frizer, the fatal affray and
the viewing of ^the breathlesse bodie’ by the Coroner’s
jury before it was ‘brought to the earth’? And what did
Sir Thomas Walsingham, with whose family Frizer re-
tained his connexion for at least ten years after the Dept-
ford homicide, think of such expressions as the ‘vnhappily
deceased author of this Poem’ and ‘the effecting of his
determinations preuented by the stroke of death’? To
one who had had first-hand information about the tragedy
of 30 May 1593 these conventional flourishes must have
sounded strangely unreal. Had Blount in view not so
much Sir Thomas as the general reading public, and is
this indirect apologia a counterblast to the fulminations
of Beard and Meres?

There is no need to assume, as has been done, that
Bolunt’s ‘impression of the man, that hath beene deare

30 MAY 1593 AT DEPTFORD STRAND 283

vnto us, living an after life in our memory’ was shared
by Shakespeare in his invocation, through the lips of
Phebe {As Ton Like It^ iii. v. 80-1),^ of the poet from
whose Hero and Leander he quotes a pregnant line :

Dead Shepherd, now I find thy saw of might :

‘Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?’

But it is to say the least, a remarkable coincidence, that
in the same Act of the same play (in. iii. 9 ff.) Touchstone
should use enigmatic words to which the statement about
‘le recknynge’ in the Coroner’s inquisition gives for the
first time a possible clue :

‘When a man’s verses cannot be understood nor a man’s good
wit seconded with the forward child Understanding, it strikes a
man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room. ’2

The parallel here may be merely fortuitous. In any case
the echoes of the tragedy, within the lifetime of the
survivors, are, as has been seen, so divergent that the
lesson of caution in taking at its face value even contem-
porary evidence is driven home anew.

' See above, p. 230

^ Since Oliver F. W. Lodge first suggested that Shakespeare was here
referring to Marlowe’s death (in T.L.S.f 14 May 1925) he has been sup-
ported by W. Poel, T.L.S., 21 May, Paul Reyher, 9 July 1925, and by
Dover Wilson in the ‘New Cambridge’ edition of You Like It (1926).
The reviewer of this edition in T.L.S., 30 Dec. 1926, maintained that this
imputed ‘brutality of sentiment’ to Shakespeare ‘who could joke in public
on the sordid tragedy of the greatest of his fellow poets’. In TX.S.y
6 Jan. 1927, Wilson and Lodge disavow this imputation. Bakeless, op. cit.,
p. 297, also accepts the topical interpretation of the passage.

XVII

THE SURVIVORS

T he story of Marlowe’s last days may be rounded off
by tracing the subsequent fortunes of the chief figures
associated with it.

Thomas Kyd did not long survive his fellow dramatist.
How long he remained in prison after 12 May 1593 we do
not know, but his imploring letters to Puckering after his
release do not seem to have procured his reinstatement
in the service of his ‘lord’ or to have otherwise bettered
his fortunes. He apparently lost his market on the London
stage and devoted a winter’s week at the close of 1593 or
the beginning of 1594 translating Robert Garnier’s
neo-classic play Corndie^ which was published in 1594
with a dedication to the Countess of Sussex who had
translated his Marc Antonie, It was praised by the intel-
lectuals, but the reading public let ‘poore Cornelia stand
naked vpon euery poste’. This was probably Kyd’s last
venture, for before the end of the year he was dead, and
on 30 December his parents took the strong step of
renouncing the administration of his goods.* It would
seem that they wished to disassociate themselves entirely
from a son whose career had ended in disgrace. If Kyd
by his accusations had wronged Marlowe, he appears to
have paid the penalty.

And there are grounds for the belief that in the same
month of December 1594 Marlowe’s other chief accuser,
Richard Baines, met a yet worse fate. In the Stationers’
Register on 6 December (Arber ii. 316) there is entered
to Thomas Gosson and William Blackwell ‘a ballad in-
tituled the wofull lamentacon e?/ R ichard Baynes executed
at Tyborne the 6. of December 1594’. No copy of the
^lamentacon’ which would have helped to identify the
culprit and his crime seems to have survived. But Cooper

* Boas, Works of Kyd, pp. Ixxvi-vii.

THE SURVIVORS: RICHARD BAINES 285

in Athenae Cantab, ii. 174 (followed by Peile and by Venn),
had no warrant except the name for stating that this
Richard Baines was the member of Christ’s College there
mentioned, of whose career nothing whatsoever is known.
With regard to Richard Baines of the Middle Temple, his
record, so far as it is known, is not inconsistent, under
Elizabethan conditions, with such a calamitous end. And
it is notable that, so far as we are aware, there is in any
case no further mention of him in any contemporary
document. Of special significance is the omission of his
name from his mother’s will, made on 17 August 1597.
Her death took place within eight days, as is shown by
this entry in the burial register of St. Peter’s, Cornhill:
1597 August 25 Thursday; M*** Grace Banes widow, her pit
in the South Chappell 50.

The main provisions of the will are as follow :

... I most hartelie desire that my bodie maie be laied and placed
in Sainct Peters church where my late deare husband Richard
Baynes lyeth And I doe by this my last will and Testament give
and bequeath to my daughter ffrauncis Baynes the somme of three
hundred and fiftie poundes of lawfull monie of England Also
I give and bequeath her the lease of my house which I now dwell
in scituat in Sainct Peters parishe I give to my good brother Sir
Nicholas Woodrofe for a remembrance of me a ringe of fortie
shillinges price and the like to my brother M*" Robert Woodrofe
Also I give to my welbeloved sisters M*"** Kingsmill my Ladie
Woodrofe Mistris Grcvell and M*"** Woodroofe everie of them one
ringe of twentie shillinges price for a remembrance of me I give
to my goddaughter Grace Reve twenty shillinges Item I give to
my cosen Kente twentie shillinges To my cosin Allin twentie
shillinges in monie and some of my olde apparrell at the discretion

of my Executrix I give and bequeath betwixt my two daughters,

that is Marie Smith and ffrauncis Baynes all my lynnen whatso-
ever my beddinge and whatsoever belonges theirto except bed-
stedes Also my carpettes and cushions brasse and pewter to be
equallie devided betwixt them by the discretion of some of my
honest neighbours or frendes. I give my daughter Smith my
Rubie ringe my Ale cuppe and two spoones of sylver and guilt
Item I give to my sonne in lawe Robert Smithe my Saphire Ringe

286 THE SURVIVORS: NICHOLAS SKERES

my guilt standinge cuppe with a cover. ... I give to Ursula
Katherin Robert and Marie Smith my daughters children everie
of them tenne poundes to be paide them by my Executrix at theire
ages of eightene yeeres if they or anie of them so longe live. Item
I give to my brother Robert Woodrofe his children to be devided
amongest them fortie poundes of lawful! monie of England I doe
ordaine and appoint my daughter ffrauncis Baynes my full and
sole Executrix of this my last will and testament.

This will, with its detailed dispositions to relatives of
different grades in three generations, besides minor and
charitable bequests, makes the impression of having been
very carefully drawn up by the testatrix. But two names
are conspicuously absent, those of her son Richard and
her youngest daughter Ursula. The latter must have
died in childhood. Richard, too, must have been dead.
He had either not married or his wife and offspring were
passed over in his mother’s will. Grace Baines speaks
affectionately of her ‘late deare husband’; her silence
about her late only son is easily understood, if he died a
felon’s death at Tyburn.

Of the three companions of Marlowe in Eleanor Bull’s
tavern on 30 May 1593 Nicholas Skeres is the most diffi-
cult to follow in Ins later life, partly because the references,
as has been seen, may not be all to the same man.
‘Nicholas Kyrse, alias Skeers, servant to the Earl of Essex’
was arrested on 13 March 1594/5 by Sir Richard Martin,
Alderman, ‘in a very dangerous company’ at the house of
one Williamson. This was prqbably Nicholas Williamson,
who on 7 April 1595, when he was a prisoner in the Gate-
house, made a deposition about Poley. Skeres after his
arrest was imprisoned in the Counter in Wood Street to
await examination. Nothing further is known of him till
31 July 1601 when the Privy Council issued warrants to
the Keeper of the prison of Newgate for the removal of
Nicholas Skiers and — Farmer, prisoners in his custodie,
unto Bridewell.

If this Nicholas Skeres, who was lodged in one London
gaol after another, was the associate of Ingram Frizer in

THE SURVIVORS: INGRAM FRIZER 287

the Woodleff litigation and the Deptford Strand aflFray,
their paths afterwards must have diverged widely. For
the slayer of Marlowe seems to have shared the good
fortunes of his master, Thomas Walsingham, who in July
1597 was visited by Elizabeth at Scadbury and was
knighted, and was a member of Parliament in her reign
and in that of James I, whose queen made a favourite of
Lady Walsingham.

A year after the Deptford Strand fatality, in June 1594,
Frizer took over from Thomas Smyth a house in the
parish of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, with possession for
three years. But he was driven out by Edmund Ballard,
against whom he brought a suit on 17 October for re-
covery of possession, which was granted to him with
damages and 6d, costs. The suit against him by the
Woodleffs, probably in 1598, has already been described.
At a later date he moved to Eltham, where he appears to
have spent the rest of his life. In a deed of sale, discovered
by Hotson, dated in June 1602, he is described as
‘late of London,^ yoman and nowe dwelling at Eltham in
the Countye of Kente’. Eltham is near to Chislehurst,
and he still kept up his connexion with the Walsingham
family. In December 1603, after a delay which required
the intervention of Sir John Fortescue, a lease in reversion
of some lands belonging to the Duchy of Lancaster, at
a rent of ^^42. 6s. ^d., was granted to Ingram Frizer for
the benefit of Lady Walsingham, the wife of Sir Thomas.

In 1611 he appears on the Subsidy Roll as one of the
two certified assessors of the parish of Eltham, being taxed
one and fourpence on a holding of land valued at 20
shillings. An inquisition was taken by a commission at
East Greenwich^ on 16 July concerning certain charities
by the oaths of sixteen ‘good and lawful men of the
County’ among who was ‘Ingram Frezer’. Among the
Commissioners were the Bishop of Rochester, the Vicar
of St. Nicholas Church, Deptford, and Sir Thomas
Walsingham. Miss de Kalb has further ascertained that
* J. W. Kirby in 17 July 1930.

288 THE SURVIVORS; ROBERT POLEY

he had a married daughter, Alice Dixon, and a grandson,
John Bankes; that he had sufficient means to keep a maid-
servant ; that he held a position of respect in Eltham, and
was churchwarden from 1605 till his death in August
1627, when he was buried in the church.

Documents at Somerset House show further that after
his death his daughter Alice propounded a ‘nuncupative’
or oral will and claimed to be his executrix. The will was
contested by the grandson, John Bankes, suing through
his father of the same name, and the Prerogative Court
declared that Frizer had died intestate. The final result
of the litigation is not known. But in any case Frizer
had died in the odour of sanctity, and evidently ‘lived
down’ any disrepute attaching to his transactions with
the Woodleffs or any suspicion of ill-fame as a homicide.

With Robert Poley also things seem to have gone on
prosperously enough till the close of the century. There
is documentary evidence that he continued to be em-
ployed as a government messenger.^ Six weeks after
Marlowe’s death, on 14 July 1 593, he was paid for carrying
letters to France and bringing back replies. Further pay-
ments followed on 19 August 1594 and the first of April
1595 for similar errands to Brussels and Antwerp. About
the time of the Antwerp visit Nicholas Williamson, a
prisoner in the Gatehouse, was deposing, on 7 April, that
‘if Pooly or Barnard Maude shall come again into the
lowe countryes they are threatened to be apprehended’. ^
Whatever may have been the foundation for this state-
ment, Poley was again receiving payments on i August
1595 for carrying letters to and from Brussels, and on
7 March 1596/7 for the same service to and from The
Hague. It was presumably after this visit to The Hague

* E. de Kalb, loc. cit. in R.E.S.^ pp. 17-18.

* Williamson also alleged that ‘Creichton chargeth Pooley to haue
poysoned the Bishop of Diuelinge’ (Dublin). I know nothing of the cir-
cumstances or the grounds of this accusation unless it is a confused
reference to a suspicion mentioned by J. H. Pollen {Mary Queen of Scots
and the Bahington Ploty p. cxxv) that in 1585 Poley poisoned in the Tower
Richard Creagh, Archbishop of Armagh.

THE SURVIVORS: ROBERT POLEY 289

that he wrote the letter dated 5 March from Hogesden^
in which he states, ‘Being evene now retou'‘ned, I thought
good to send this inclosde, before I came mysellfe’, and for-
wards at the same time ‘a booke in sheets, one of the firste I
thinke came out of the presse : the subiects cheefly intended
against e the religion and goue*’me[n]t of Englande^^

The Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the
Chamber do not record all the payments to Poley for his
services as a messenger abroad. On one of the copies
(Item 105 a) of his 1596--7 cipher Miss Seaton has found
a memorandum^ of ‘A note of mony delivered to Robert
Pooley imployed in Flande’*®’, and entry of a payment to
him on 3 December 1596 of £20 ‘by y Steward as ap-
peareth by an acquittance’. There are also memoranda
of two further payments to him of the same sum on 25
March and 23 July 1597.

The payment on 23 July was made at the Court at
Greenwich. Poley was therefore at home in the summer
of 1597? and he could therefore have been one of the ‘two
damn’d Villans’, who, as Ben Jonson told Drummond,
were placed during his close imprisonment ‘to catch ad-
vantage’ of him. Mark Eccles has recently argued^ that
Jonson was referring to his imprisonment in the Marshal-
sea from early in August till 8 October 1597 for his part
in The Isle of Dogs^ and that there is an echo of his gaol
experiences in his Epigram, ci, ‘Inviting a Friend to
Supper’, when he declares:

And we will haue no Pooly^ or Parrot by.

Parrot (or Parratt) is accused by a Newgate prisoner of
being a spy and extortioner, and the coupling of his name
with that of ‘Pooly’ here is highly suggestive. Poley would
indeed be raised to a bad eminence if not only Marlowe
but Jonson came within his baneful orbit.

However this may have been, by the end of 1598 he was
again being employed on foreign service. By a warrant of

* ‘Robert Foley’s Ciphers’, ^.£.5., April I93i,p. 150. ^ Loc.cit.,p. 139.

^ ‘Jonson and the Spies’, R.E.S., Oct. 1937, pp. 385 ff.

4427 pp

290 THE SURVIVORS: ROBERT POLEY

19 December he was being paid for bringing letters to and
fro from the Governor of Bayonne, and by a warrant of 10
July and 21 December 1600 for similar missions to Eliza-
beth’s agent at The Hague and Sir John deLaye in France.
These three warrants were all signed by ‘Mr Secretary’.
Yet by the close of 1600 Poley had fallen out of favour
with that great official. A long letter to Sir Robert Cecil
dated 17 December 1600 begins, ‘Since it pleasde your
Honor to sequester mee from your seruice and bountye’.
He seeks to regain Cecil’s favour by promising to ‘search
out and discover the obscure Arte Sc cunynge which the
Jesuits vse’.

‘I find the poUyticke Jesuite to be the most dangerous personne
that anye commonwealth can nourishe or suffer beeing continvallye
whisperinge & busyc in seacrett & peremptorye oppositions &
devices procedinge from theyr proude ambityous and violent
humors, for the most parte very dangerous or preiudicyall to the
Prince Sc State wher they lyve favour’d or forbydden ; which maye
to the purpose be fytlyeste examyned and vnderstoode by theyr
manifoulde procurements and practises againste oure Cuntrye.’

He describes their methods in some detail, and warns
Cecil of their hostility to him personally and to the Eng-
lish Queen and State. He then undertakes to provide an
effective counterblast to their machinations :

‘Howe agreeable Sc needfull itt is also in some generall volume
exactly to examyne aunswer Sc controule [i.e. contradict] the
particular abuses of their sedicyous and pestilent Bookes, I
humblye refer to your honorable Consyderation : confidentlye
assuringe you that if it shall please your Honor to accepte the offer
Sc give supportaunce Sc means needfull to the performance of so
importante a businesse as this discoverye wyll bee: that then with
learninge Sc knowledge sufficyent a Booke shal be wrytten Sc sett
forthe, much more substancyall to the effects afore specyfyde then
any hath beene heretofore publishde in that kinde.’

As he had previously done on 5 March 1596/7, Poley
sent with his letter an example of the type of literature
that he was eager to expose and confute :

‘The Booke inclosde was (as I thinke your Honor knowes) 5 years

THE SURVIVORS: ROBERT POLEY 291

since disperste in wrytten Coppyes by the Author R. Suthwell.
And lately by Garrett, Garnett and Blackwell putt in printe
though foreadvisde by good discretion nott to do itt. Wher the
leafe is putt in your Honour maye readylye finde howe they deale
with Sir Fra[ncis] Walsingham, I proteste most falcelye slandringe
him and wyckedlye abusing him.’

The book was evidently the pamphlet by Robert South-
well, the Jesuit poet and controversialist, entitled An
Humble Supplication to Her Maiestie, It was printed
anonymously, and is dated at the end 14 December 1595
as well as 1595 on the title-page.^ It is an eloquent, un-
compromising apologia for the Jesuits as propagandists of
what in Southwell’s eyes is the only saving faith:

‘The whole and onely intent of our comminge into this Realme
is no other, but to labour for the saluation of soules, and in peace-
able and quiet sort to confirm them in the ancient Catholike faith,
in the which theyr forefathers liucd & died, these thousand foure
hundred yeares, out of which we undoubtedly beleeue it is im-
possible that any soule should be saved.’

Poley probably chose this particular work to send to
Cecil because in the attack upon the memory of Sir Francis
Walsingham Southwell magnified the part played by
Poley himself in the Babington plot. He states in its
most explicit and extreme form the contemporary Roman
Catholic thesis that Babington and his accomplices were
dupes drawn into a net by Poley as the chief agent-
provocateur, Cecil was the last man to believe this, but
it might help to impress him with a sense of Poley’s
importance.

‘As for the action of Babington^ that was [in truthe]* rather a
snare to intrap them, then any deuise of their owne, sith it was
both plotted, furthered, & finished, by S[ir] Francis Walsingham,
Sc his other complices, who laied Sc hatched al the particulers
thereof, as they thought it wold best fall out to the discredit of
Catholiks, Sc cutting of the Queene of Scots; for first it is to be

* The copy in the British Museum, one of the very few extant, has a
large number of MS. corrections in a contemporary hand.

^ Added in MS.

292 THE SURVIVORS: ROBERT POLEY

known to all, that Poolie being Sir F, W alsinghams man, and
throughly seasoned to his Maisters tooth, was the chiefe instrument
to contriue & prosecute the matter, to draw into the net such
greene wittes, as (fearing the generall oppression, and partly
angled with golden hookes) might easilie be ouer wrought by
M. Seer, subtile & sifting wit. . . . And though none were so deepe
in the very bottome of that conspiracy as Poolie himselfe, yet was
hee not so much as indited of any crime, but after a little large
imprisonment (more for poUicy then for any punishment) set at
liberty, & is in more credit then euer he was before.’

Southwell’s crowning indictment is contained in the
following passage:

‘It is further knowen that the coppie of that letter which
Babbington sent to the Queene of Scots, was brought ready penned
by Poolie, from M. Secretary: the answere whereof, was the princi-
pal grounds of the Queenes condemnation. There was also found
in Sir Frauncis W alsinghams accountes after his decease, a note of
7000 pounds bestowed vpon [NaweY & Curlie, who being the
Queenes Secretaries, framed such an answere as might best serue
for a bloody time, & fit his intention that rewarded them with so
liberall a fee.’

It may reasonably be conjectured that it was here that
Poley put in a leaf to draw Cecil’s special attention. For
Southwell here asserts that Babington’s letter of 12 July
1586 to Mary Queen of Scots, in which he offered to
murder Elizabeth, was composed by Sir Francis W^alsing-
ham and brought to Babington ‘ready penned’ by Poley;
and that Mary’s answer on 17 July, agreeing to the pro-
posal, was the work of her secretaries influenced by an
enormous bribe.

It is sufficient to say that the authenticity of both
Babington’s and Mary’s letters has been overwhelmingly
demonstrated for all who do not follow in the tradition
of Southwell’s partisanship. But what I am more con-
cerned with here is the curiously similar and sinister
association of Poley with the tragedies of the Queen of
Scots on the one hand and of Marlowe on the other. The

* Substituted in MS. for the printed 'Nato.

THE SURVIVORS: ROBERT POLEY 293

partisans of Mary in the sixteenth century accused Poley
of being privy to the fabrication of a letter, which led up
to what they considered the political murder at Fotherin-
gay. The partisans of Marlowe in the twentieth century,
who dispute the verdict at the inquest, implicate Poley
in the fabrication of evidence to conceal what was pre-
sumably a political murder at Deptford.

Whether or not it was a result of this petition to Cecil
in December 1600, Poley was employed twice in the
following year as messenger to and from the English am-
bassador in Paris. Warrants for payments to him were
issued by Mr. Secretary on 4 August and 5 September.
It would seem to have been in connexion with the former
of these visits that in July 1601 he tried to smuggle into
England a young cousin, George Cotton, who had been
for two years a student at St. Omer, but who was stopped
at Dover by the Warden of the Cinque Ports. On 18 July
1602 he again wrote to Cecil about the Jesuits, sending him
information derived from Robert Barrois, a priest. He
avers that Cecil’s low estimate of his previous services ‘is
the cause that I haue not since presented myself with offer
of my duty, although I much desire my endeavours might
please you, my necessities needing your favour’.^

So in the ebb-tide of his fortunes he disappears from
view. But whatever were his crimes and follies, the ad-
venturer was born under no ordinary star who crossed the
paths of Christopher Blunt and Anthony Babington, of
Francis and Thomas Walsingham, of Philip and Frances
Sidney, of Mary Stuart and Christopher Marlowe. He is
the very genius of the Elizabethan underworld.

^ See references by Sir Edmund Chambers in a review of Leslie Hotson’s
7 he Death of Christopher Marlowe {Mod. Lang. Rev.^ Jan. 1926). His
quotations are from Hatfield MSS. xi. 216, 278, 302, and xii, 230.

In view of Cecil’s attitude I think it unlikely that Poley was ‘our well-
beloved Subiect R.P.’ to whom in or about 1600 the next vacant place
of yeoman waiter in the Tower was granted (Ethel Seaton in R.E.S.,
April 1931, p. 150). And much more improbably was he the Robert
Pooley, ‘citizen and haberdasher of London’, who made a will in 1626
(E. Vine Hall, Testamentary Papers^ iii. 22).

XVIII

MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

FROM THE JACOBEAN AGE TILL TO-DAY

I T is one of the many paradoxes confronting us in
relation to Marlowe’s career that the popularity of his
plays with theatre-goers, so rapidly achieved, seems to
have ended almost as rapidly. Though, as will be seen,
the plays were revived from time to time in the seven-
teenth century their vogue ended with Elizabeth’s reign.
Even to the reading public, if we may judge by the
number of editions called for, they made less appeal than
Hero and Leandety to say nothing of the translation of
Ovid’s Amores, Exception must be made of Doctor Faustusy
but this was in a version which included much that was
not from Marlowe’s pen.

It is possible that the dramatist’s tragic end, with the
legendary embellishments pointing the moral of the fate
of the ‘atheist’, may have helped to affect the fortunes
of his plays in the theatre. But, apart from this, there
was a more general cause. In the Jacobean period the estab-
lished popularity of Shakespeare, and in still greater
measure that of Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher,
rapidly out-moded the stage-fashions of the era typified
by Marlowe and Kyd. The fact that Henslowe found it
expedient to pay considerable sums to Jonson for two sets
of additions to Fhe Spanish Tragedy in i6oi and 1602 and
to William Birde and Samuel Rowley for additions to
Doctor Faustus in 1602 before his revival of these two plays
is in itself significant that this shrewd commercial manager
realized a change in theatrical tastes. Caustic evidence to
the same effect is supplied abundantly from a more high-
brow quarter by Ben Jonson. Even before the sixteenth
century was out he was guying The Spanish Tragedy by
making the coxcomb Bobadill and the Town Gull, Master

MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES 295

Mathew sing its praises {Every Man in his Humour
I. V. 46-51 (1598)):

Boh, What new book have you there ? What ! Go by, Hiero-
nymoP

Math. Ay, did you ever see it acted ? Is ’t not well penned ?

Bob. Well penned ! I would fain see all the poets of these times
pen such another play as that was.

So in the Introduction to Cy thiols Revels 1600 it is
some one ‘with more beard than brain’ who vociferates
that ‘the old Hieronimo, as it was first acted, was the very
best and judiciously penn’d play of Europe’; and in the
Introduction to Bartholomew Fair (1614), ‘whoever will
swear leronimo or Andronicus are the best plays yet shall
pass unexcepted at here as a man whose judgment shows
it is constant and hath stood still these five and twenty or
thirty years’. Ironical depreciation gives place to down-
right invective when Jonson attacks the author of Tam-
burlaine in Discoveries-.^

‘The true artificer will not run away from nature, as he were
afraid of her; or depart from life and the likeness of truth; but
speak to the capacity of his hearers. And though his language
differ from the vulgar somewhat, it shall not fly from all humanity
with the Tamerlanes and Tamer-Chams of the late age, which
had nothing in them but the scenical strutting, and furious
vociferation to warrant them to the ignorant gapers.’

It is a classic instance of the havoc wrought by the
violent swing of the pendulum in theatrical taste that so
fine a wit as Jonson should have been able to see nothing
but ‘scenical strutting and furious vociferation’ in Tam-
burlaine. There was more excuse for Thomas Hey wood’s
apology to Charles I and his Queen for daring to present
before them at Whitehall in 1633 ^
fashion as The Jew of Malta. Even so its revival by such
a theatrical connoisseur as Heywood proves that he
believed that it could still be an attraction on the stage.

There are other occasional references to performances of

* Ingeniorum discrimina. Not. 10.

296 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

some of the plays in the reigns of James I and Charles 1 .
The most striking is that by John Melton in The Astrolo-
gas ter y or the Figure Caster (1620) :

‘Another will fore-tell of Lightning and Thunder that shall
happen such a day, when there are no such Inflammations seene,
except men goe to the Fortune in Golding- Lane, to see the Tragedie
of Doctor Faust%s. There in deede a man may behold shagge-
hayr’d Deuils runne roaring ouer the Stage with Squibs in their
mouthes, while Drummers make Thunder in the Tyring-house,
and the twelve-penny Hirelings make artificiale Lightning in their
Heauens.’

Edward II (as the title-page of the 1622 quarto states)
was acted by Queen Anne’s men at the Red Bull theatre.
This was probably between 1612, when the previous
quarto had appeared, and 1619 when the Queen died.
Tamburlaine was performed at the same theatre, appa-
rently about 1640. In Cowley’s The Guardian (Act iii. vi),
acted at Cambridge on 12 March 1641/2, two of the char-
acters have a furious altercation :

Blade. First, leave your raging, Sir: for though you should
roar like Tamerlin at the Bull, ’twould do no good with me.

Truman. I, Tamerlin, I scorn him, as much as you do, for your
ears. I have an action of slander against you, Captain. . . . Pll not
be call’d Tamerlin by any man.

Considering how few these definite references to per-
formances in the first half of the seventeenth century are,
it is surprising to find Edmund Gayton’s statement in Fes-
tivous Notes on Don Quixote (1654):

‘I have known, upon one of these festivals . . . where the players
have been appointed, notwithstanding their bills to the contrary,
to act what the major part of the company had a mind to; some-
times T amhurlaine, sometimes Jugurth,'^ sometimes The Jew of
Malta, and sometimes parts of all these.’

The last words might almost apply to the 1663 edition
of Doctor Faustus, ^as it is now acted’, which omits the
two longest additions, in Act iii. i and ii, of the 1616

* A lost play by Will Boyle mentioned by Henslowe in 1599-1600.

THE JACOBEAN AGE TILL TO-DAY 297

quarto, and substitutes, besides a new scene at the Court
of the Soldan, echoes of the siege episodes in The Jew of
Malta. The complete elimination from this text of
references to the Deity and religious matters has sug-
gested that it may have been acted in this form by strolling
companies during the Commonwealth period.^

How far the innumerable references to, and burlesques
of, episodes and lines in the plays, ^ especially Tamburlaine
and Doctor Faustus are reminiscences of performances seen
rather than of texts read, it is impossible to say. But if
one may judge from these allusions in plays, poems, and
pamphlets between 1603 and 1660, where Marlowe con-
tinued to hold the stage it was by virtue of the cruder and
more melodramatic features in his dramas. Tamburlaine’s
‘roaring’ at his pampered jades, the devils and the
squibs in Doctor Faustus^ the artificial nose of the Jew —
it was these that caught the ears or eyes of theatre-goers
and stayed in their memories. Of the unique qualities of
his genius as a poetic dramatist there is but the faintest
recognition. An exception would have to be made if
Michael Drayton was thinking of him as a playwright
when he wrote the exquisitely apt lines on him in the
elegy to his friend Henry Reynolds, Of Poets and Poetry
(1627):

Next Marlowe, bathed in the Thespian Springs,

Had in him those brave translunary things
That your first poets had; his raptures were
All air and fire, which made his verses clear.

For that fine madness still he did retain,

Which rightly should possess a poets brain.

But it is to be noted that Marlowe is introduced be-
tween Warner and Nashe, and that there is no allusion
here to the stage or to the theatre as when Drayton passes
on to speak of Shakespeare and Jonson. He was probably

* Tucker Brooke, Works of Marlowe, p. 141.

* These are admirably summarized by Tucker Brooke in ‘The Reputa-
tion of Christopher Marlowe’ (Trans, of Connecticut Acad, of Arts and
Sciences, vol. xxv, 1922).

4427

298 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

here recalling the raptures of air and fire in Hero and
Leander. It was bj^ this poem, in Heywood’s view, that
Marlowe gained ‘a lasting memory’, while in famburlaine
and Jew it was the actor, Edward Alleyn, who won
a peerless name.^ Even Ben Jonson, so contemptuous of
‘the Tamerlanes and the Tamer-Chams’ was often heard
to say of the lines in Hero and Leander that ‘they were
Examples fitter for admiration than for parallel’.^ And
the waves of the Thames echoed to the romance of the
Hellespont as Taylor, the water-poet, rowed his boat,
‘Repeating lines of Hero and Leander\

Of Marlowe’s uncompleted poem only Blount’s 1598
edition is known, and this in a single copy. It was super-
seded for contemporary readers in the same year by
Linley’s edition with Chapman’s continuation, and the
popularity of the composite work was attested by the
rapid succession of further editions in 1600, 1606, 1609,
1613, 1617, 1622, 1629, and 1637.

There was a sustained demand also for the translation
of the Amores^ though none of the editions has a date or
a printer’s name, and ‘at Middleborough’ is almost cer-
tainly a blind. Four editions can be distinguished of the
complete three Books of the Elegies^ and two of these
editions, it has been claimed on typographical grounds,
can hardly have been printed earlier than 1640.^ There
are also two editions of selections, surviving respec-
tively in one and two copies. On the other hand, the
1600 issue of the Lucan translation seems to have satisfied
the demand.

On turning from the poems to the plays it is surprising,
after the resounding triumph of T amburlaine, to find that
only one edition of either Part was called for in the
seventeenth century, Part I in 1605 and Part II in 1606,
Of Edward II two Jacobean editions appeared in 1612

^ The Prologue to The ^ew of Malta at the Cockpit.

^ R. C.’s Preface to William Bosworth’s Chast and Lost Lovers (1651),
Quoted hj Tucker Brooke, op. cit., p. 364.

3 Tucker Brooke, Works of Marlowe, p. 553.

THE JACOBEAN AGE TILL TO-DAY 299

and 1622. 7 he Jew of Malta survives only in the 1633
quarto.

It was Doctor Faustus that alone among the plays rivalled
with the reading public the popularity of Hero and Lean-
der. The 1604 quarto was reprinted in 1609 and 1611,
and the 1616 version Vith new additions’ reappeared in
1619, 1620, 1624, 1628, 1631, while even after the Restora-
tion there was, as has been seen, a public for the 1663
mutilated version. Indeed, the booksellers of this period
still thought that there was a reading public for all Mar-
lowe’s dramas for they all appear in the successive play-
lists of Rogers and Ley (10^56), Edward Archer (1656),
and Francis Kirkman (1661 and 1671).^ Archer and Kirk-
man explicitly state that all the plays in their lists can be
bought. Among the purchasers we may probably count
Milton’s nephew, Edward Phillips, who in Theatrum
Poetarum (1675) called Marlowe ‘a kind of a second
Shakespeare . . . though inferior both in Fame and Merit’.
Though Phillips based this claim chiefly on Hero and
Leander^ and went wrong about the authorship of Tam-
burlainef^ yet he could declare : ‘of all that he hath written
for the Stage his Dr, Faustus hath made the greatest noise,
with its Devils and such-like Tragical sport, nor are his
other 2 Tragedies to be forgotten, namely his Edw, the II
and Massacre at Paris , besides his Jew of Malta a tragic
comedie,^ and his Tragedy of Dido in which he was
joyned with Nash\ The ‘Tragical sport’, as Phillips calls
it, was degraded by the actor William Mountford into the
farcical medley of The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus
with the Humours of Harlequin and Scaramouche (1697);
and by a dancing-master, John Thurmond, into the still
lower buffoonery of Harlequin Dr. Faustus (1724).^

^ See Appendix II to W. W. Greg’s A List of Masques ^ Pageants y iAc.

2 See above, p. 70.

3 The booksellers were evidently puzzled how to classify Phe Jew of
Malta. Archer lists it as H (History); Kirkman in 1661 as T (Tragedy) and
in 1671 as TC (Tragicomedy).

^ See Doctor Faustus, ed. F. S. Boas, pp. 50-1.

300 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

An affront, of a different kind, to Marlovian tragedy
was offered by Charles Saunders, author of Tamerlane the
Great (i68i), which was said by its critics to be ‘only an
Old Play transcrib’d’. Saunders protested that

‘I never heard of any Play on the same Subject, untill my own
was Acted, neither have I since seen it, though it hath been told
me, there is a Cock Pit Play going under the name of the Scythian
Shepherd, or Tamberlain the Great, which how good it is, anyone
may judge by its obscurity, being a thing, not a Bookseller in
London, or scarce the Players themselves, who Acted it formerly
couM call to remembrance.’*

It is evident that Saunders had not troubled himself to
look at Kirkman’s catalogues.

The ignorance of Saunders and, what is more significant,
the silence of Dryden, herald the almost complete eclipse
of Marlowe during the first half of the eighteenth century.
Except for Thurmond’s travesty of Doctor Faustus^ and
the inclusion of Edward II in Dodsley’s Old PlaySy ist
edition (1744), followed by that of The Jew of Malta in
the 2nd edition (1780), there is little to record. But from
about the middle of the century the actors, Garrick and
J. P. Kemble, and the scholars, Isaac Reed, George
Steevens, and Edmund Malone begin the search for
copies of the early editions of the plays and poems for
which we owe them an incalculable debt.

The beginnings, too, are laid of Marlovian biography,
which made it henceforth impossible to say with Aubrey
that he had been killed by Ben Jonson or with Oldys that
he was born early in Edward Vi’s reign, though as late
as August 1819 an anonymous writer in The Monthly
Review raises the astounding query, ‘Can Christopher
Marlowe be a nom de guerre assumed for a time by Shake-
speare?’ Meanwhile, Thomas Warton had anticipated the
modern interpretation of Marlowe’s atheism,^ and had
thereby provoked Joseph Ritson into printing for the first

* Tucker Brooke, Reputation of Christopher Marlowe, p. 384.
^ History of English Poetry, 1774-81.

THE JACOBEAN AGE TILL TO-DAY 301

time Richard Baines’s ‘Note’ of his blasphemies.^ Malone
in his made-up volume of Marlowe’s works inserted
manuscript annotations showing knowledge of the drama-
tist’s academic career and disposing of the legend that he
was an actor before he became a playwright.

It is somewhat puzzling why suddenly in the early
decades of the nineteenth century there came something
like a spate of reprints of Marlowe’s plays and poems.
It began, paradoxically enough, with the inclusion of his
translation of Lucan in Poems in Blank Verse {not Drama-
tique) prior to MiltorCs Paradise Lost^ edited by Bishop
Percy and George Steevens (1807).^ Phe Jew of

Malta and Edward //, already included in Dodsley’s Old
Plays^ were reprinted in Scott’s The Ancient British
Drama, In 1814 Doctor Faustus appeared in vol. i of
C. W. Dilke’s Old English Plays where Edward II was
again reprinted. Hero and Leander was included in Sir
Egerton Brydges’s Restitution (1815), Chappie’s Old Eng-
lish Poets (1820), and Singer’s Select English Poets (1821).
Dido followed in vol. ii of Hurst, Robinson & Co.’s Old
English Drama (1825),

The comedian, William Oxberry, edited in 1818 sepa-
rate texts of The Jew of Malta^ Edward If Doctor Faustus^
The Massacre at Paris ^ and the apocryphal Lusfs Domi-
nion^ followed by T amburlainey Parts I and II, in 1820.
All of these, together with Dido^ were reissued by him in
1827 in a single volume, The Dramatic Works of Christo-
pher Marlowe, A unique publication of 1818 was the text
of The Jew of Malta as prepared by S. Penley for Edmund
Kean’s revival of the play at Drury Lane on 24 April
1818. This included beside Penley’s own additions and
changes a number of excerpts from Edward II,

In 1826 from the house of Pickering came the first
collected edition of Marlowe’s works in three volumes.
The anonymous editor, apparently George Robinson,
performed his task so carelessly that his successor,

^ Observations on W arion^ 1782, pp. 39 ff.

^ See Tucker Brooke, loc. cit., p. 389.

302 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

Alexander Dyce, could convict him of ^the grossest errors’.
Yet it is important as the first of the collected editions,
and a British Museum copy contains valuable manuscript
annotations by James Broughton, who also contributed
two important articles chiefly relating to Marlowe to The
Gentleman's Magazine, 1830. On the other hand, the
great critical trio of the Romantic movement did less than
might have been expected for the recognition of Mar-
lowe’s genius. If Lamb praised the death-scene in Edward
II almost extravagantly in his Specime^is (1808), yet he
could speak of the difficulty’ in culling a few sane lines
from Tamburlaine, Coleridge says very little about him.
Hazlitt, in his 1820 Lectures on The Literature of the Age
of Elizabeth, includes him among a set of writers, ^whose
names are now little known, and their writings nearly
obsolete’, though he states that ‘Marlowe is a name that
stands high, and almost first in this list of dramatic
worthies’. He shows real appreciation of Doctor Faustus
but underestimates Edward II, And his illustrations of
the ‘mighty line’ are drawn not from Tamburlaine which
he does not mention, but from the apocryphal Lust's
Dominion' .

With Alexander Dyce’s three-volume edition (1850) the
period of critical editing of Marlowe’s Works begins. Dyce
modernized the spelling and his collation of the original
texts may be criticized in some of its aspects. But his
remarkable knowledge of Elizabethan literature and his
scholarly acumen give his edition (reissued in one volume
in 1858) a permanent value. Francis Cunningham’s one-
volume edition (1870) added little to Dyce. A. H. Bul-
len’s in three volumes (1885) is specially notable for its
Introduction, where his fine aesthetic sensibility produced
the most adequate interpretation of Marlowe’s genius that
had yet appeared. Bullen’s edition, like Dyce’s, was in
modernized spelling, but in the same year 1885, there
appeared at Heilbronn the first volume of a ‘historisch-
kritische Ausgabe’ of Marlowe’s works in the original
spelling. This was T amburlaine, edited by Albrecht Wag-

THE JACOBEAN AGE TILL TO-DAY 303

ner, with a collation of the known original texts. It was
followed in 1889 by an edition of Doctor Faustus by Her-
mann Breymann, with the 1604 and 1616 texts in parallel
form. An edition of F he Jew of Malta in the same year
by Wagner brought this scholarly venture to a premature
end.

About the same time a number of the plays were being
made accessible to readers in general through the first
volume of the Mermaid series (1887), the Clarendon Press
editions of Edward 11 and Doctor Faustus^ and of the same
plays in the Temple Dramatists series.

In 1910, exactly sixty years after Dyce’s edition and
a quarter of a century after Bullen’s, C. F. Tucker Brooke
brought out the one-volume Oxford edition of Marlowe’s
Works, in the original spelling, with a full collation of the
early texts, and with facsimiles of their title-pages. To
the present time Brooke’s edition remains the only one
in Elizabethan spelling.

Side by side with the editorial labours on Marlowe’s
writings had gone intensified research into his personal
career. An obstacle from the very first had been placed
in the way of his biographers by the inaccurate entry in
the Deptford Church register of the name of his slayer
as ^ffrancis’, instead of Ingram, ^ffrizer’. Confusion was
worse confounded when an inquiry by James Broughton
in 1820 elicited the following reply:

Extract from the Register of Burials in the Parish of St. Nicholas,
Deptford.

1st June 1593. Christopher Marlow slain by Francis Archer.

A True Copy. — D. Jones, Minister.

This ^true copy’ sent many investigators in search of a
phantom ‘Archer’, though there were others who got as
near as ‘Frezer’ or as ‘Frazer’, and Sidney Lee in his
article on Marlowe in the Dictionary of National Bio-
graphy y vol. xxxvi (1893), thought it well to hedge on the
matter. Here the question rested for over thirty years.

Meanwhile, however, new light was being thrown upon

304 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

other phases of Marlowe’s career. In 1894 Lee drew
attention to the appearance of the two sureties in October
1589 on his behalf before the Recorder. A reference in
Lee’s article on Thomas Kyd in the Dictionary of National
Biography put me in 1898 on the track of Kyd’s letter to
Puckering accusing Marlowe of atheism, supplemented in
1921 by Ford K. Brown’s discovery of Kyd’s second, un-
signed, letter. In 1904 J. H. Ingram included in his
Christopher Marlowe and his Associates facsimiles of im-
portant documents relating to the dramatist’s Canterbury
and Cambridge years. In 1909 G. C. Moore Smith threw
fresh light on the Cambridge period from the Corpus
Christi Account Books.

A new stage in Marlovian biography was opened by Leslie
Hotson’s discovery in 1925 of the documents relating to
the inquest on Marlowe proving the identity of his slayer
and of his two other companions on the day of his death.
The spelling of his name as Morley in these documents
led Hotson also to conclude that he was the Christopher
Morley to further whose graduation the Privy Council
had intervened in June 1587.

Hotson’s discoveries have opened up new lines of in-
vestigation, especially concerning the dramatist’s asso-
ciates. Miss E. de Kalb in T^he Times Literary Supplement^
21 May 1925, gave particulars of Frizer’s later life from
the Eltham Parish registers ; and in the Review of English
Studies^ January 1933, she printed the documentary
records of Poley’s activities as a Messenger of the Court,
1588 to 1601. In Marlowe and his Circle (1929) I gave
fresh particulars of Poley’s “career from documentary
sources, and in The Review of English Studies^ April 1931,
Miss Seaton explained and illustrated his system of
ciphers.

In an Appendix to his Life of Marlowe (1931) Tucker
Brooke threw fresh light on the informer Richard Baines
and his relatives, and this was supplemented, especially from
testamentary evidence, by E. Vine Hall and myself in
The Nineteenth Century and After^ December 1932. Vine

THE JACOBEAN AGE TILL TO-DAY 305

Hall also in 1937 from similar evidence was able to show
the status of a number of the jurymen at the inquest.

Mark Eccles in 1934, from researches at the Middlesex
Guild Hall, discovered that the charge in 1 5 89 which obliged
Marlowe to find sureties was in connexion with the killing
of William Bradley in which the dramatist was involved
with Thomas Watson, and for which they both were im-
prisoned in Newgate. He also in 1 592 had to enter into
a recognizance to keep the peace towards two constables
in Holywell Street.

The most recent additions to the dramatist’s biography
have been made by John Bakeless in his Christopher
Marlowe (1938). He has thrown new light on the Mar-
lowe family from the Canterbury city archives, and has
supplemented Moore Smith’s data from the Corpus
Christi Account-Books by the investigation of the College
Buttery Book, with its more detailed record.

Some of the other contributions to the study of indi-
vidual plays, or of special phases of Marlowe’s work, have
been by Knutowski on Dido^ FrauleinThimme on The Jew
of Malta^ Percy Simpson in his two English Association
essays on Doctor Faustus^ Miss Seaton and F. Danchin on
sources of T amburlaine^ and Tucker Brooke on Marlowe’s
Reputation. Miss Ellis-Fermor in 1927 made a brilliant
attempt on a shaky chronological foundation to trace the
development of his ideas in the plays and poems. Philip
Henderson produced a vigorous study of the dramatist
and his environment from a left-wing point of view in
1937. He took his title ‘And Morning in his Eyes’ from
Swinburne, who wrote a poem in honour of William
Poel’s revival of Doctor Faustus by the Elizabethan Stage
Society in 1896. Further revivals of this and other of the
plays have followed on both sides of the Atlantic, usually
before academic or festival audiences.

A piece by C. E. Lawrence, The Reckonings based on
the inquest story, was acted at the Royal Academy of
Dramatic Art on the occasion of the Elizabethan Literary
Society’s Jubilee (1934). Mainly on the initiative of this

4427 R X

3o6 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

Society, a Memorial to Marlowe was erected in Canter-
bury. It was unveiled in 1891, with the design not com-
pleted, by Sir Henry Irving, and in its completed state
in 1928 by Sir Hugh Walpole, who, like the dramatist,
was a pupil at the King’s School.

A memorial of a different kind was begun in 1930 by
the publication of the first two volumes, under the general
editorship of R. H. Case, of a six- volume edition of The
Life and Works of Christopher Marlowe. Each volume, in
modernized spelling, had a separate editor, and aimed at
embodying the latest results of Marlovian scholarship.
The edition was completed in 1933.

AN ATTEMPT AT A SUMMING-UP

I HAVE thus traced in outline the chequered fortunes of
Marlowe’s reputation as a man and a writer during the
three centuries and a half since 30 May 1593, when he
died by the hand of Ingram Frizer. Is it now possible to
form a clear picture of his personality and his achieve-
ment ?

So far as his biography is concerned, we are met with
the curious paradox that the more we learn about his life
the more puzzling are many of the aspects that it pre-
sents. It makes the impression of a series of kaleidoscopic
views following upon one another without a^y'a^afent
relation. At every succeeding period of his career Mar-
lowe seems to have an entirely different set of associates.
Canterbury gives him a respectable family connexion, and
sends him from its King’s School to Corpus Christ!
College with a scholarship. But when he has once bidden
farewell to the place of his nativity, the city, the family,
and the school all appear to drop completely out of his life.

He spends six years at Cambridge in close association
with Archbishop Parker’s other scholars from the King’s
School and from Norwich, and goes through the regular
academic routine before graduating B.A, Yet none of his

AN ATTEMPT AT A SUMMING-UP 307

Corpus Christi contemporaries is afterwards mentioned
among his friends. Though his B.A. certificate is signed
hy his College tutor and he continues afterwards to hold
his scholarship, pressure has to be put on the academic
authorities by the Privy Council, on the score of his
having rendered some unspecified good service to her
Majesty, before he is allowed to proceed to his M.A.
degree.

Immediately afterwards this young man of twenty-
three years, who has been dividing his time between his
studies in preparation for taking Holy Orders and some
form of Government employment bursts upon the Lon-
don world as a playwright acclaimed by theatre-goers and
assailed by envious rivals. Two years later he is suddenly
revealed in company with Thomas Watson in a fatal street
affray with its sequel of his arrest and imprisonment in
Newgate. From this confinement he is soon released
on the bond of two sureties, Richard Kitchen and
Humphrey Rowland, with whom he has no other appa-
rent connexion. Watson was probably known to him
through Thomas Walsingham, but he is not mentioned
by Kyd in the list of Marlowe’s friends. Of these the
most prominent is Thomas Harriot, but in all the mathe-
matician’s voluminous writings there is no reference to
Marlowe. And though Harriot was in Raleigh’s service,
it is not from him but from the obscure Richard Chomley
that we hear of any personal contact between the drama-
tist and Sir Walter.

Kyd is tantalizingly silent as to the name of the lord
for whose players Marlowe wrote, and the glimpse that he
gives of the meeting between the two dramatists in one
room on some occasion in or about 1591 throws no light
upon the nature of their association, tempting though it
be to assume that this was for professional purposes.
Nashe’s memorial verses which might have told us more
than we know of the relations between himself and Mar-
lowe have disappeared. Most important of all, there is not
a jot of evidence pointing to personal intercourse between

3o8 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

Marlowe and Shakespeare, though conjecture has run
riot on the subject.

Nor have we any details of Marlowe’s previous associa-
tion with Thomas Walsingham before the Privy Council’s
order on i8 May 1593 to have him arrested at Scadbury.
What a glaring contrast between this order and the certi-
ficate of good service given to him by the Council six
years before! The arrest was probably occasioned by
Kyd’s charges, but why does Richard Baines, who appa-
rently had no connexion with either of the dramatists,
suddenly now come forward with his incriminatory
‘Note’ ? Strangest of all, why is Marlowe found on 30
May 1593 in a Deptford tavern with three associates,
most unfitted by their previous records to be in the com-
pany of a poet-playwright of genius? And though the
most prominent of the trio, Robert Poley, has left a series
of confessions and letters and ciphers, Marlowe’s name is
nowhere to be found in any of them. And, as the final
enigma, though the entry of his burial is extant in the
Register of the Church of St. Nicholas, Deptford, his grave
has disappeared, and he has vanished as completely from
earthly view as if his name were writ in water.

Thus viewed his life-record forms a drama as absorbing
as any of his own tragedies but with the strange inconse-
quence of one of those modern Russian plays where
characters wander in and out without any apparent
relevance to the action. Yet somehow in the end they
do fit in, and so with Marlowe there must have been
causal links between the seemingly unrelated episodes in
his career. Some have been suggested in the course of the
present study. Whether these are accepted or not, I feel
convinced that Marlovian research in recent years has
provided striking examples of how increasing knowledge,
however welcome, reveals also new depths of ignorance
and raises problems hitherto unforeseen. ‘Alps on Alps
arise.’

But in the light of what we do now know it seems to
me that we cannot accept without qualification the epi-

AN ATTEMPT AT A SUMMING-UP 309

grammatic summing-up of the dramatist’s career in ^he
Return from Parnassus, Part II. i. ii:

Marlowe was happy in his buskined Muse,

Alas, unhappy in his life and end.

There is no sufficient reason to believe that Marlowe was
‘unhappy in his life’. Indeed at various turning-points in
it, as I have tried to show, he seems to have been favoured
by fortune and even in serious crises to have fared better
than Watson or Kyd. And though doubtless he was un-
happy in his end, it might even be urged that it was better
for him to find sudden death at the hand of Ingram Frizer
than to suffer, if the Government acted on Kyd’s and
Baines’s charges, the dread Elizabethan penalties for
atheism and treason.

The question of Marlowe’s atheism has been already
examined. That of his treason iTmore puzzling. How is
it that within a few years of earning the Privy Council’s
certificate of good service he fell under its ban? No fully
satisfactory answer can be given. But Kyd’s allegation of
Marlowe’s intended flight to the Scottish Court; Baines’s
charge of counterfeit coining; the association with a
revolutionary desperado like Chomley and an agent-
provocateur like Poley, point in different ways to equivocal
political practices or intentions. And we now know that
in the fatal Bradley affray and in the affair with the
constables Marlowe had been in collision with the repre-
sentatives of the law.

All this is a reminder of what we are apt to forget, that
no one can hope to understand the Elizabethans who does
not realize that they ‘lived dangerously’. To test them
by modern standards of morality or maxims of wo rldly
prudences to go astray. Men who were constantiv face^
foTace with violent revolutions of fortune, who were
surrounded by a network of espionage and intrigue, whose
words or actions might bring them at any moment to the
Tower or Newgate, to the block, or the stake, were not
predestined to be patterns of scrupulous rectitude. Not

310 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

only men of the underworld like Poley, Chomley, and
Frizer, but statesmen and persons of quality, Christopher
Blunt, Francis Walsingham, Walter Raleigh, are far from
complying with the codes that would be binding on them
to-day. Even a Philip Sidney in Astrophel and Stella gives
voice to his passion, idealized and transfigured though it
be, for the woman who had become the wife of a rival.
And as to the writer of the greatest of all Elizabethan
sonnet-series, can we really credit the suggestion that
Shakespeare ‘probably returned to his native town and
home every summer or autumn for months at a time, and
there prepared for the coming Christmas season, writing
happily and swiftly in the midst of his family and friends’? ^
The triangular drama of the poet, the noble patron, and
the dark lady comes between us and this rose-coloured
idyll of domestic bliss.

And this brings us up against another strange aspect of
Marlowe’s career. In it there is no record of any figure
corresponding to the dark lady or even to Stella. Baines
accuses him of loving boys. But neither he nor Kyd nor
any one else, till Meres invented the tale of the fatal duel
with a rival in his lewd love, charged him with being an
ordinary profligate. Baines also accused him of being fond
of tobacco. But though he died in a tavern, his enemies do
not denounce him as a drunkard, and the legal documents
give no support to the theory that Marlowe was ‘probably
more than a little drunk’^ when he attacked Frizer.

Kyd was, of course, not thinking of intoxication when
he arraigned Marlowe as ‘in temperate and of a cruel he^ t’l
What he had in mind was his ^rashnes fn attemptin^l^en
pryuie iniuries to men’. There rises before us a figure of
passionate impulse and restless intellect, quick at word
and blow, equally ready with the dagger-point and the
no less piercing edge of a ruthless dialectic. This mordant
temper was conjoined with a soaring and radiant imagina-
tive faculty. It is a fusion peculiar to the Renaissance and

* From the Preface to E. J. Fripp’s Master Richard Quyney.

^ Bakeless, op. cit., p. 226.

AN ATTEMPT AT A SUMMING-UP 311

it leaves Christopher Marlowe, when all is said and done,
something of an enigma. William Shakespeare of Strat-
ford-on-Avon we recognize, and Ben Jonson of West-
minster, but this son of Canterbury and Cambridge has
in him a quality aloof from the English country-side or
the banks of the Thames. He would have breathed more
congenial air sauntering beside the Arno or swimming in
a gondola along the Grand Canal.

But if the man. Kit Marlowe, seems still to evade us,
we can determine more clearly the place of Christopher
Marlowe, the playwright. Lamb was not well inspired
when he called him ‘the true (though imperfect) Father
of our tragedy’.* In a sense the title might be given to
Thomas Sackville, for in the Inner Temple play Gorboduc,
of which he was the chief author, Senecan machinery and
rhetoric, and five-act divisions were united with a theme
drawn from British history. Blank verse for the first time
became the instrument of the English tragic Muse, and
though it was end-stopped and stereotyped in form it
showed at its best (as has been insufficiently recognized)
the quality of melodious rhythm which distinguishes
Sackville’s Induction to A Mirror for Magistrates.

But it was Kyd who, so far as we know, acclimatized
neo-Senecan drama on the boards of the public theatre,
and who has thus a fuller claim than Sackville to be called
‘the true (though imperfect) Father of our tragedy’. He
united the ^necan apparatus, including G host, Mes-
senger, and Chorus t o a realism an d c(mstructive power
were n ew to the English sta^e a nd ensured the
triumph of ^he Spanish tragedy. Hence sprang that long
line of ‘revenge’ plays which reach their apotheosis in
Hamlet.

Marlowe, as has been seen, came under loftier influences
than those of the Roman world of Nero. In his six years
at Cambridge he drank deep of the spirit of the Augustan
age enshrined in the poetry of Virgil and Ovid. He ‘learnt

* Extracts from the Garrick Plays, in Works of Charles and Mary Lamb,
ed. E. V. Lucas, iv. p. 426.

312 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

[their] great language, caught [their] clear accents’. He
thus felt himself free from the first to dispense with the
traditional machinery and types of the Cordoban stage,
though he retained the five-act structure, and, in glorified
form, the instrument of blank verse.

His method, as investigation in recent years has made
increasingly evident, was to choose a subject congenial to
his temper and then to follow his sources with close
fidelity. It was part of his technique to capture at once
the eyes and ears of the theatre audience with an arresting
opening and to send them home at the close enthralled by
an elaborately worked up finale. In the intervening scenes
he paid relatively little attention to the articulation of the
plot, though he showed skill and discrimination in choos-
ing from his materials the episodes that best suited his
purpose, and, when he wished, he could manage terse and
economical dialogue. He had not the prodigal creative
facul ty that is the supreme attribute of the world^s
master-dramatists, though the minor figures in his plays
are often firmly enough outlined within a brief compass.
His distinctive achievement was to endowe the protago-
nists in his dramas with his own elemental vitality so that
they stormed their way into the imagination of gallants
and groundlings alike. And, as has been seen throughout
the course of this study, he enlisted in the service of
Melpomene not only the ‘new learning’ which was the
old transformed, but also the science of his day in its
various branches — physiology, cosmography, astronomy,
and the rest. And in a theatre open to the air how must
the constant invocations by Marlowe’s characters of
celestial powers have gone home to the hearers, whose
fortune it was thus to hear voiced

The high that proved too high, the heroic for earth too hard,
The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky.

But Marlowe, with the strong realist elemen t in his
complex personality, was aware that the air and fire of his
raptures could not^lone win and keep the favour of an

AN ATTEMPT AT A SUMMING-UP 313

Elizabethan theatre crowd. The old view that he was
without humour has been disproved b^ the examples
quoted from his table-talk, and echoes of such talk, with
its acid flavour, have been traced in the plays. But far
more effective, to judge by the mass of contemporary
allusions, were the episodes of crude sensationalism and
barbaric violence which mingled so incongruously with
the loftier flights of his tragic muse. And, as has been seen,
it was not long before these baser elements were taken to
be representative of his art not only by the groundlings
but by the intelligentsia.

That helps to explain why revivals of Marlowe’s plays
on the amateur or professional stage to-day do not fully
realize expectations. Some of the features that made for
their contemporary triumph now leave us cold or even
antagonized. Even the alliterative attraction of Ben
Jonson’s tribute to ^Marlowe’s mighty line’ may have done
him some disservice. It has fastened attention unduly on
the more sonorous and declamatory aspects of his verse
and diction. These no doubt served their purpose well,
especially when he was a ne wcomer to the London stage.
But ‘might’ is not the crowning virtue of Marlowe’s
poetic dialogue. It lies rather in a perfect lucidity and
precision which translate thoughts and emotions into
rhythmical speech with felicitous exactness. This is in
the deepest sense the ‘classical’ element in Marlowe’s
genius. It was instinctive with him. It was polished in the
Augustan school of Latin poetry. It lifts him, regarded
purely as a master of dramatic utterance, into the com-
pany of the highest. In the loftiest reaches of Tamburlaine
and Doctor Faustus he was the first of Englishmen, per-
haps of modern Europeans, to make the theatre echo to
accents that were not unworthy to vie with those of
Sophocles^or^ Euripldes-

Presenting Thebes, or Pelops’ line,

Or the tale of Troy divine.

But with Marlowe this classical diction was the

314 MARLOWE THROUGH THE CENTURIES

interpreter and instrument of a restlessly moving and
questing spirit ever in pursuit of the illimitable ideals of
beauty and knowledge and power, ever in search of

One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least
Which into words no virtue can digest.

To the more rarefied atmosphere of the Stuart age this
exaltation of spirit was alien, or it passed from poets and
playwrights to philosophers and scientists. Thus the quin-
tessential element in Marlowe’s genius was incommuni-1
cable and it died with him. He founded no school. The
prose of Lyly’s Camfasfe and Endymion lives on, trans-
figured, in As You Like It and Much Ado about Nothing.
Kyd’s Hieronimo and Shakespeare’s Hamlet are un-
mistakably akin. But even if Yhe Merchant of Venice and
Richard II are indebted to The Jew of Malta and Edward
//, the obligation does not go deep. The measure of the
division between Marlowe and Shakespeare may be seen
in the contrast between Faustus and Prospero. It was of
the creator of the latter that Dryden wrote

( But Shakespeare’s magic could not copied be :

Within that circle none durst walk but he.

Of Jonson and Fletcher he has also much to say; of
Marlowe not a word. It has been left to later generations
increasingly to realize that Marlowe’s ‘magic’, within its
narrower circle, is as potent and inimitable as Shake-
speare’s, and still wields its enchanting spell. When he
died by violence before his time can we wonder that the
tragic Muse was inconsolable and exacted retribution by
breaking the mould wherein he had been cast ?

APPENDIX

[A List of Principal Documents and Early Editions'\
CHAPTER I

1. Roll of the Freemen of the City of Canterbury from a.d. 1392
to 1800.

[Transcribed, in alphabetical arrangement, from the City Chamber-
lains’ Accounts by Joseph Meadows Cowper (1903).]

2. Archdeaconry Register in Public Record Office, Canterbury.

[Contains the wills of Christopher Marley (5 March 1539/40),
vol. 21, fol. 258 f.; Dorothy Arthur, vol. 50, fol. 361; John Mar-
lowe, vol. 52, fol. 373, and Katherine Marlowe, vol. 54, fol. 267,
printed by Tucker Brooke, Life of Marlowe (1930), pp. 89-96.]

3. The Register Booke of the Parish of St. George the Martyr
within the Citie of Canterburie.

[Printed from the original Registers by J. M. Cowper, 1891.
Facsimile of the entry of Christopher Marlowe’s baptism in J. H.
Ingram’s Christopher Marlowe and his Associates (1904).]

4. MS. Register of St. Andrew’s Church, Canterbury.

5. MS. Register of St. Mary Bredman, Canterbury.

6. City of Canterbury MSS. Accounts, in the Beaney Institute.

[References by John Bakeless in Christopher Marlowe (1937),
PP- 333 - 5 -]

7. Canterbury Marriage Licences, 1568-1618.

[Printed by J. M. Cowper, in alphabetical arrangement, from
‘Liber Licentiarum’, in the Archdeaconry archives (1892).]

8. MS. Accounts of the King’s School, Canterbury, in the
Cathedral Library.

[Facsimile of Treasurer’s accounts of payments made in 1578-9 to
King’s School Scholars, including Marlowe, in Ingram, op. cit.,
P- 33 -]

CHAPTER II

1. MS. Cambridge Matriculation Lists in the University Registry.

2. MS. Grace Books of the University of Cambridge.

[Facsimiles of entries of Marlowe’s admission to B.A. and M.A.
degrees in Ingram, op. cit., pp. 81 and 93.]

3i6 appendix

3. Indenture between John Parker and Corpus Christi College
concerning Archbishop Parker’s scholarships.

[Discovered by John Bakeless in a manuscript book of C.C.C.
‘Statuta’, &c.]

4. MS. Corpus Christi College Admission Book (Registrum
Parvum).

[Facsimile of entry of Marlowe’s admission among the Pensioners,
in Ingram, op. cit., p. 47.]

5. MS. Corpus Christi College Buttery Books.

[Containing entries of weekly payments by Marlowe between tenth
week of Michaelmas term, 1580, and third week of Michaelmas
term, 1586.]

6. MS. Corpus Christi College Order Book.

7. MS. Corpus Christi College Accounts (Audits, &c., 1575-90).

[Extracts relating to payments of Marlowe’s scholarship 1580-5 and
1586-7, given by G. C. Moore Smith in ‘Marlowe at Cambridge’,
Modern Language Review^ January, 1909.]

8. The Privy Council MS. Register, 29 June 1587. Entry
‘Whereas as it was reported that Christopher Morley’, &c.

[Printed in Acts oj the Privy Council^ ed. Dasent, vol. xv, pp. 140-1,
and in J. Leslie Hotson’s Lhe Death of Christopher Marlowe (1925),
pp. 58-9, as ‘A Certificate from the Privy Council in favour of
Marlowe’.]

9. Historical MSS. Comm., Salisbury MSS. xii. 211-12. Letter
from William Vaughan from Pisa, 14 July 1602, to Privy
Council concerning ‘one Christopher Marlow’.

[Reprinted in Hotson, op. cit., pp. 60-1.]

10. MS. Bills of Keepers of the Gatehouse Prison, Westminster,
1596-1606. Entry in sheet from 25 June to 23 September
1604 re ‘Christopher Marlowe alias Mathews, a seminary
preist’.

[Quoted by Sir Israel GoUancz in The Times ^ 23 June 1925, ‘The
Other Marlowe’.]

11. MS. Records of the English College at Valladolid. Entries re
John Matthew (Mathews) alias Christopher Marler, 1 599-1603.

[Quoted by J. B. Whitmore in The Times, 24 July 1925, ‘The
Other Marlowe: Fresh Evidence for Identity’. See also Sir 1 .
GoUancz ‘The Other Marlowe’, ibid. 25 July.]

12. Calendar of State Papers relating to English Affairs preserved
principally at Rome, vol. ii, 1572-8, ed. J. M. Rigg (1926).

APPENDIX
CHAPTERS III-IV

317

(JVhere co'pies are uniquey the library or owner is mentioned!)

3. Ouids Elegies: | Three Bookes. | By C. M. | Epigrammes by

I. D. I Middlebourgh. 8^°. n.d. (Bodleian Douce 03 1 .)

4. All I Ovids Elegies: | 3. Bookes. | By C. M. | Epigrams by

J. D. At Middlebourgh. n.d.

5. Title-page as in 4, but with different ornaments.

6. Title-page as in 4, but with different ornaments.

[No copy containing the elegy by Nashe on Marlowe ‘inserted
immediately after the title-page’, vouched for by Tanner and
Warton (see p. 50, above), has been traced.]

CHAPTERS V-VI

3i8 appendix

Ihones: at the signe | of the Rose and Crowne neere Hoi- |
borne Bridge. 1590. 8^^°.

[The head- title to Part II is, with some variants of spelling, similar
to the half-title in the 1590 edition.]

[Head-title to Part II as in 1592 edition.]

APPENDIX
CHAPTER VII

319

1 . Middlesex Sessions Roll 284, No. i. Recognizance of Christo-
pher Marlowe, i October 1589.

[Noted by J. C. Jeaffreson in Middlesex County Records^ vol. i,
p. 257. Facsimile by J. H. Ingram, op. cit. Printed by Tucker
Brooke, op. cit., pp. 9^7, and marginal note interpreted by Mark
Eccles, Christopher Marlowe in London^ p. 33.]

2. Middlesex Sessions Roll 284, No. 1 2. List of persons committed
to Newgate from 9 Sept, to 2 Oct. 1589.

[Entry relating to Thomas Watson and Christopher Marlowe
printed by Eccles, op. cit., p. 34.]

3. Chancery Miscellanea 68, file 12, no. 362. Writ and return
into Chancery of a Gaol Delivery at Newgate reciting the
Coroner’s inquest on William Bradley killed in an affray with
Watson and ‘Morley’.

[The return printed by Eccles, op. cit., pp. 22-4.]

4. Patent Roll C 66/1340, membrane 34. / Enrolment of the
pardon of Thomas Watson.

[Printed by Eccles, op. cit., pp. 25-6.]

5. Star Chamber 5 A 1/29.

[Evidence of Richard Kitchen, i June 1600, on behalf of W.
Williamson, host of the Mermaid. Printed by Eccles, op. cit. p. 87.J

6. Registers of St. Botolph’s Church, East Smithfield.

[Extracts relating to Humphrey Rowland, 1577-93, printed by
J. Leslie Hotson in ‘Marlowe Among the Churchwardens’, in the
Atlantic Monthly^ July 1926.]

7. King’s Bench Controlment Roll 29/222, m. 12/. Summons to
Humphrey Rowland.

[Printed by Hotson, Atlantic Monthly, July 1926, and Eccles, op.
cit., p. 95.]

8. Henry Oxiden’s Common-place Books, in British Museum
(Add. MSS. 28012) and Folger Shakespeare Library.

[Extracts by Eccles in ‘Marlowe in Kentish Tradition’, N. Q,, 13,
20, 27 July, 24 Aug. 1935.]

9. Thomas Kyd’s signed letter to Sir John Puckering, the Lord
Keeper. Harl. MSS. 6849, f. 218.

[Transcribed, with facsimile, in Works of Thomas Kyd, ed. F. S.
Boas, 1901; transcribed by F. C. Danchin, Revue Germanique,
Nov.-Dee. 1913, and Tucker Brooke, op. cit., pp. 103-6.]

APPENDIX

320

10. MS. Fragments of a Socinian treatise quoted in John Proctor’s
^he Fal of the Late Arrian (1549). Harl. MSS. 6848, ff. 187-9
(formerly 172-4).

[Transcribed, with facsimile of f. 189, by Boas, op. cit., and by
F. C. Danchin, loc. cit. W. Dinsmore Briggs {Studies in Philology y
April 1923) has identified the printed source of the fragments, and
has shown what is their right order in ‘the Late Arrian’s’ treatise.]

CHAPTER VIII

1. State Papers (Domestic), vol. ccxxii, no. 13, 7 Jan. 1588/9.
Examinations of William Yeomans and others before William
Fleetwood, Recorder of London.

2. Ibid., no. 14. Deposition by Richard Ede.

[Short abstract of both documents in Calendar of State Papers^
Domestic, 1581-go, p. 573.]

3. State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of Scots.
C. 5 .P.J vol. xvi, 10 July 1585 (Thomas Morgan to Mary, Queen

of Scots).

4. „ vol. xvi, 1 5 July 1585 (Charles Paget to Mary).

5. „ vol. xvii, 18 January 1585/6 (Thomas Morgan to Mary

and Curll).

6. „ „ 21 March 1585/6 (Thomas Morgan to Mary).

7. „ „ 31 March 1586 (Charles Paget to Mary).

8. „ vol. xviii, 27 July 1586 (Mary to Thomas Morgan).

9. „ vol. xix, [Aug.] 1586 (Charges against Poley).

10. „ „ [Aug,] 1586 (Confession of Poley).

[Printed in slightly abbreviated form, in modernized spelling, in
Calendar of State Papers relating to Scotland and Mary, Queen of
Scots, 1547-1603, vol. viii, edited by William K. Boyd.]

11. Lansdowne MSS. 49, f. 63. Letter of Babington to Poley.
Other copies in Bodleian, Rawlinson MSS. D 264/1, and B.M.
Addit. MSS. 33938, no. 22.

12. Bills of the Lieutenant of the Tower in P.R.O.

[Nos. E 407/56; nos. 44, 47, 50 printed by Eugenie de Kab in
Nineteenth Century and After, Nov. 1927.]

APPENDIX 321

13. State Papers (France), xvii, 26. Letter to the Earl of Leicester
from Poley, Feb. 1587 (?).

[Transcript slightly abbreviated in Cal. of State Papers, Foreign,
June 1586-June 1588, pp. 228-9.]

CHAPTERS IX-XI

2. The I Massacre | At Paris: | With the Death of the Duke |
of Guise. I As it was plaide by the right honourable the | Lord
high Admirall his Seruants. j Written by Christopher Marlow.

I At London | Printed by E, A. for Edward White, dwelling
neere | the little North doore of S. Paules | Church, at the signe
of I The Gun. 8^0.

3. MS. expanded version of 11 . 812-27 of Tucker Brooke’s text of
The Massacre at Paris,

[Transcripts by J. P. Collier in Dodsley’s Old Plays, vol. viii (1825),
and in History of English Dramatic Poetry (1831). The leaf, now in
the Folger Shakespeare Library, is reproduced in facsimile with a
transcript in modernized spelling and punctuation by J. Quincy
Adams in The Library, March 1934. W. W. Greg adds an unedited
transcript.]

4. MS. title-page of Edward the Second, dated 1593, and first
seventy lines.

[Prefixed to imperfect copy of the 1598 quarto of the play in South
Kensington Museum. Facsimile in Malone Society’s reprint of the
play, ed. by Greg.]

4427 TP t

322 APPENDIX

6. The troublesome | raigne and lamentable death of | Edward
the second, King of | England: with the tragicall | fall of
proud Mortimer: And also the life and death of Piers Gaueston
I the great Earle of Cornewall and mighty | fauorite of King
Edward the second, as it was | publiquely acted by the right
honorable | the Earl of Pembrooke his] seruantes. | Written by
Chri. Marlow Gent. | Imprinted at London by Richard
Bradockcy | for William lones dwelling neere Holbourne
conduit, I at the signe of the Gunne, 1598. 4^°.

7. The troublesome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the
second, King of England, &c. . . . for Roger Barnes. 1612. 4^°.

[Two issues, in one of which a page is duplicated. Unique copy of
corrected issue in B.M. (644 b. 68).]

8. The troublesome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the
second. King of England, &c. . . .for Henry Bell. 1622. 4^°.

[Two issues, one repeating the statement of the earlier editors that
the play was acted by the Earl of Pembroke’s servants, the other
altering this to ‘As it was publiquely acted by the late Queenes
[Anne’s] Maiesties Servants at the Red Bull in S. lohns streete’.]

9. The First Part of the Contention betwixt the two famous
Houses of Yorke and Lancaster. . . . Hhomas Creede^ for Thomas
Millington. 1 594. 4^®.

[Another edition, Valentine Simmes for Millington, 1600.]

10. The True Tragedie of Richard Duke of York ... as it was
sundrie times acted by the Right Honourable the Earle of
Pembrooke his seruants. P.S. ior Thomas Millington. 1595. 4^°.

[Another edition; W. W .for Millington, 1600.]

11. The Whole Contention betwecne the two Famous Houses,
Lancaster and Yorke. . . . Divided into two Parts: And newly
corrected and enlarged. Written by William Shakespeare,
Gent, for T[homas^ P[avier\ 1619. 4^°.

12. [In the Shakespeare First Folio.] The Second Part of Henry
Sixt, with the death of the Good Duke Humfrey. The Third
Part of Henry the Sixt, with the death of the Duke of Yorke.
1623.

13. The Lamentable and True Tragedie of M. Arden of Feuer-
sham in Kent ... for Edward White. 1 592. 4^°.

[Other editions, 1 . Roberts for White. 1599; Eliz. Allde. 1633.]

APPENDIX

323

14. The Tragedye of Solyman and Perseda . . . Edward Allde for
Edward White, n.d. 8^®.

[Another edition, Allde for White, 1599.]

CHAPTER XII

1 . A Pleasant Conceited Historie, called the taming of a Shrew . . .

Peter Short, sold by Cuthbert Burley. 1594 ^ 59 ^* 4 ^°*

[These editions of The Taming of a Shrew contain (in addition to
about thirty lines from both Parts of Tamburlaine) several passages
from Doctor Faustus in their earliest known form.]

2. The I Tragicall | History of D. Faustus. | As it hath been Acted
by the Right | Honorable the Earle of Nottingham his
seruants. | Written by Ch. Marl. | London | Printed by |
V[alentine'\S{immes\f or Thomas Bushell. 1604. 4^^®. (Bodleian.)

4. Another edition with similar title, by Eld for Wright. 1611.
4^®. (Huntington.)

5. Henslowe’s Diary, f. loS'^:

‘Lent vnto the companye the 22 of novmbr 1602 \
to paye vnto w”* Bvrde & Samwell Rowle 1 iiij^\’

for ther adicyones in doctor fostes the some of )

[The first edition with the Additions, and with the woodcut on the
title-page of Dr. Faustus with his conjurer’s gown, book, and wand,
and with a dragon at his feet.]

8. Another edition with similar title. 1620. 4^°. (British Museum.)

9. Another edition with similar title. 1624.4*^®. (British Museum.)

10. Another edition with similar title. 1628. 4^°.

324 APPENDIX

11. Another edition with similar title. 1631. 4^°.

12. The Tragicall History | of the Life and Death of | Doctor
Faust us I Printed with New Additions as it is now Acted.
With several | New Scenes, together with the Actors Names |
Written by Ch. Mar. | Printed for W. Gilbertson at the Bible
without Newgate 1663. 4^®.

CHAPTER XIII

1 . The Passionate Shepherd to his Love.

[Different versions in ^he Passionate Pilgrim (1599),

Helicon (1600), John Thornborough’s commonplace-book, and Phe
Compleat Angler (1653 and 1655).]

2. Sir W. Raleigh’s Reply,

[Different versions in England's Helicon and fhe C ample at Angler.

3. ‘I walked along a Stream’, &c.

[Lines, signed ‘Ch. Marlowe’, in the section of England's Parnassus
(1600) entitled ‘Description of Seas, Waters, Rivers, &c.’]

[Includes, without mention on the title-page, Chapman’s additional
Sestiads; mentions, but does not include, the translation of Lucan.]

8. Another edition, E. Blunt and W. Barrett, 1609. 4^*’.

9. Another edition, W, Stansby for E. Blunt and W. Barrett, 1613.

4 ‘».

APPENDIX

325

10. Another edition, G. P[urslowe]for E. Blount. 1607. 4^®.

11. Another edition, G. P\urslowe\for E, Blount^ 1622. 4^®.

12. Another edition, A. M\athews\jor R. Hawkins, 1629. 4^®.

13. Another edition, N. Okesjor W. Leake, 16'^J. 4^°.

CHAPTERS XIV-XV

1. Thomas Kyd’s signed letter to Sir John Puckering. Harl, MSS.
6849, f. 218 (see above, chap. VII, no. 8).

2. Thomas Kyd’s unsigned letter to Puckering. Harl. MSS. 6848,
f. 154.

[Transcribed by Ford K. Brown, with some misreadings, in T.L.S.,
2 June 1921; by Tucker Brooke in Life; and with facsimile, in
English Literary Autographs, 1 550-16 50: Part 1 . Dramatists, ed.
W. W. Greg (1925), no. xv (b).]

3. The Privy Council’s warrant to Henry Maunder for the arrest
of Marlowe, 18 May 1593.

4. Entry in the Privy Council’s Register of Marlowe’s appearance
before their Lordships, 20 May 1 593.

5. Registers of St. Peter’s Church, Cornhill.

[Transcribed in Harleian Society’s Registers, vol. i. Contains dates
of the christenings of the children of Richard Baines, senior, and of
his own burial.]

6. Minutes of Parliament of the Middle Temple.

[Edited by C. T. Martin. Contains admission entry of Richard
Baines.]

7. St. John’s College, Oxford, Buttery books, 1582--3, 1583-4,

1584-5-

[Containing the receipts of the ‘batells’ of Richard Baines.]

8. Entry in the Privy Council Register of Richard Baines’s
appearance before their Lordships, 2 February 1588/9.

9. Charges of Richard Baines against Marlowe. Harl. MSS. 6848,
ff. 185-6 (formerly 170-1) (original Note). Harl. MSS. 6853,
ff. 307-8 (formerly 320-1) (copy sent to Queen Elizabeth).

[Original transcribed with a few omissions by Boas, op. cit. and in
full by Tucker Brooke, op. cit. Original and copy transcribed in
full by Danchin, loc. cit.]

326 APPENDIX

^‘Remembraunces of wordes and matter againste Ric[hard]
Cholmeley.’ Harl. MSS. 6848, ff. 190 (formerly 175).

Charges against Chomley by an anonymous informer. Harl.
MSS. 6848, £191 (formerly 176).

Letter of Justice Young announcing Chomley’s arrest. Harl.
,MSS. 7002, f. 10.

[Chief parts of these three documents printed by F. S. Boas in
Fortnightly Review, Feb. 1899, pp. 223-4. Printed in full by
Danchin, loc. cit.; 10 and ii printed by G. B. Harrison, in Shake-
speare^s Fellows, pp. 71-4 (1923).]

13. The Privy Council MS. Register, 13 May and 29 July 1591,
and 19 March 1592/3. Warrants mentioning Chomley.

[Printed in Acts oj the Privy Council, ed. Dasent, vols. xxi and xxiv.]

14. Letter of Earl of Essex concerning Chomley, 13 Nov. I 593 *

[Summarized in Historical MSS. Commission, Fourth Report,
p. 330, and by Danchin, op. cit., p. 63.]

15. Depositions of witnesses before the Commission held at Cerne
Abbas in Dorset on 21 March 1594, in answer to interroga-
tories concerning Atheism or Apostacy. Harl. MSS. 6849,
ff. 183-90.

[Extensive extracts printed by J. M. Stone, fhe Month, June 1894,
and by F. S. Boas in Literature, nos. 147 and 148. Full transcript
by Danchin, loc. cit., and by G. B. Harrison in Appendix to his
edition of Willobie His Avisa (1926).]

11.

12 .

CHAPTER XVI

1. Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber.

[Contain payments to Poley, 1588-93, transcribed by Eugenie de
Kalb in A. 5 ., Jan. 1933,]^

2. State Papers, 106, vol. ii.

[Contain Poley’s ciphers. Described, with a facsimile, by Ethel
Seaton in R.E.S., March 1931.]

3. State Papers (Dom.), Elizabeth, vol. ccxxxviii, no. 140. De-
position of Robert Rutkin, broker, concerning Poley as an
agent of Sir Thomas Heneage, April (?) 1591.

[Summary in C.S.P, {Dom), i5gi-4, p. 35.]

APPENDIX

3^7

4. State Papers (Dom.), Elizabeth, vol. ccxlii, no. 25. Letter of
Sir Robert Cecil to Sir T. Heneage, 25 May 1592, concerning
interview with Poley.

[Summary, op. cit., p. 223.]

5 . 1 Close Rolls 1339.

6 . 1 Exchequer Plea Rolls 381, 394, and 396.

[Concerning financial transactions by Ingram Frizer, 1589-95.
Summaries by J. Leslie Hotson, fhe Death of Christopher Marlowe,

pp- 42-S7O

7. Chancery Proceedings, Elizabeth, bundle W. 25, no. 43. Suit
of Woodleff versus Frizer.

[Printed from the imperfect original document by Hotson, op. cit.,
pp. 69-71,]

8. Lord Chamberlain, 4/192, p. 267. Bond of Drew Woodleff to
Thomas Walsingham, 29 June 1593.

[Summary by Hotson, op. cit., p. 48.]

9. Lansdowne MSS. 44, no. 38. Letter of William Fleetwood to
Lord Burleigh, 7 July 1585, mentioning Skeres.

[Mentioned by Sir E. Chambers, T.X.S., 21 May 1925.]

10. Chancery Miscellanea, bundle 64, file 8, nos. 241 a and 241 b.
Writ of certiorari to summon the case of Ingram Frizer into
Chancery.

11. Inquisition returned by William Danby, Coroner of the House-
hold, in obedience to the writ.

[Both documents printed in full, with English translation, by
Hotson, op. cit., pp. 26-34.]

12. Patent Rolls 1401. Enrolment of the Pardon of Ingram Frizer.

[Printed with facsimile by Hotson, op. cit., pp. 34-7 and frontis-
piece; printed by Tucker Brooke, op. cit., pp. 108-10.]

13. Wills of jurymen who served at the inquest on Marlowe.

[Extracts from the original documents at Somerset House in
E. Vine Hall’s Testamentary Papers, III (1937).]

14. Register of the Church of St. Nicholas, Deptford. Entry of
Marlowe’s burial, i June 1593.

[Facsimile of part of the page containing the entry in J. H. Ingram’s
Christopher Marlowe and his Associates, with an erroneous transcrip-
tion. SeeHotson, op. cit.,pp. 21-2.]

328

APPENDIX

CHAPTER XVII

1. Will of Grace Baines, 17 August 1597 (Prerog. Court Cant.
Cobham 83).

[Main sections printed by F. S. Boas and E. Vine Hall in Nineteenth
Century and After^ Dec. 1932.]

2. Privy Council MS. Register, 31 July 1601. Warrant for the
removal of ‘Skiers’ and Farmer from Newgate to Bridewell.

[Printed by Dasent, op. cit., xxxii, p. 130.]

3. /^ Signet Office Docquets: Warrant, 5 Sept. 1603.

4. < State Papers (Dom.), Addenda, James I, xl. 46.

5. (p.R.O. Index 6801.

[Three documents relating to lease of reversion of lands belonging
to the Duchy of Lancaster to Frizer on behalf of Lady Audrey
Walsingham. Printed by Hotson, op. cit., pp. 49-50.]

6. Subsidies 127/566. Entry concerning Frizer as an assessor of
the parish of Eltham.

[Summarized by Hotson, op. cit., p. 51.]

7. Eltham Parish Registers. Entries re Frizer in Eltham to
August 1627.

[Summarized by Eugenie de Kalb, T.L.S.y 21 May 1925.]

8. Declared Accounts of the Treasurer of the Chamber.

[Contains payments to Poley, 1594-1600. See chap, xvi, no. I.]

9. State Papers (Dom.), Elizabeth, vol. cclxxv, no. 141. Letter
of Poley to Sir R. Cecil, 17 Dec. 1600, concerning Jesuits.

[Transcribed, in abridged form, and in modernized spelling, in
C,S.P, {Dom.), i5g8~i6oi.'\

10. Hatfield MSS. xi. 216, 278, 301, and xii. 230. Poley in July
1601 and July 1602.

[Summarized by Sir E. Chambers, Mod. Lang, Rev., Jan. 1926.]

INDEX

Adams, J. Quincy, 169-71.

Ailesbury, Thomas, 114.

Alasco, Albertus, 52.

Aldrich, Simon, 19, 35, no, 256, 280 «.
Alexander, Peter, 192-3, 195-7.

Allde, Edward, 151.

Allen, John, 102.

Allen, Thomas, 257-8.

Allen, William, 26.

Alleyn, Edward, 66, 69, 168.

Alleyn, Richard, 106.

Amor Constans^ 223.

Archer, Edward, 70, 299, 300.

Arden of Feversham^ 66 198-200.

Ardern, Alice, 200.

Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 95, 100.
Aristotle, 231, 260; Analytics^ i 6 \ de
Anima^ 257; Organon^ 16, 160.
Arnall, William, 246.

Arthur, Christopher, 3.

Arthur (Marlowe), Catherine, 3, 5, 6.
Ashe, Eve, 107.

Assheton, John, 1 12.

Aston, Sir E., 255.

Audley, Thomas, 127.

Awger, Henry, 272.

Babington, Anthony, 124-5, 259, 268,

273, 291-3-

Bagot, R., 255.

Baines, Fraunces, 246, 285-6,

Baines, Grace, 248, 285-6.

Ba(i)nes (Smith), Mary, 246, 285-6.
Baines, Richard (merchant of the
Staple), 246-9, 285.

Baines, Richard (of the Middle Tem-
ple), 104, 1 13-14? 212, 245-52, 254-
60, 277, 284-6, 301, 304, 308-10.
Bai(y)nes, Ursula, 246, 286.

Bakeless, John, 4 «., 5 9 «., 10

I 2 «., i7»., 114 n., 147 »., 152,

154 168 283 «., 305.

Baldwyn, Robert, 272.

Ballard, John, 124.

Bamfield, Katherine, 264.

Banes, Richard, 246.

Bankes, John, 288.

4427

Banyster, Henry, 268.

Barber, John, 272.

Barrois, Robert, 293.

Batt, James, 272.

Batt, Thomas, 272.

Baynes, Richard (Christ’s College,
Cambridge), 245.

Baynes, Richard (of Whaddon), 246.
Baynes, Thomas, 246.

Beard, Thomas, 279-82.

Beaumont, Francis, 294.

Belleforest, Francois de, Cosmographie
Untverselle^ 19, 95, 100, 13 1.
Bennett, H. S., 138 n., 142 «., 153,

I 58 ?!., 1 68—9.

Birde (Borne), William, 167, 205-6,
294.

Blackwell, William, 284.

Blount, Edward, 42-3, 112, 224-5,
281-2, 298.

Blunt (Blount), Charles, 118, 122.
Blunt (Blount), Christopher, 118-22,
127, 273, 293, 310.

Blunt, William (Lord Mountjoy),
118.

Boas, F. S., 37 55 193 «.,
204 «., 205 «., 206 «., 21 1 «., 216
266 241 «., 242». ; Marlowe and his

Circle^ 304.

Bonfinius, A., 88-90, 100.

Borage, Jasper, 253-4.

Boswell, E., 204 n.

Bosworth, W., Cbast and Lost Lovers
298 n.

Boyle, Will, Jugurth^ 296 n.

Bradbrook, C. M., 90, ii3«., 259
263 «.

Bradley, William, 102, 108, 117, 236,

252, 305? 309-

Bradocke, Richard, 173.

Breton, Nicholas, 70.

Breymann, H., 303.

Bridgman, James, 21.

Brooke, C. F. Tucker, 4 «., 5 13, 43,

49, 105, 132, 154, 168, 192-8, 206,
242 «., 244, 246, 248, 297«., 298 «.,

303-4-

u u

INDEX

330

Chapman, George, 244; continuation of
Hero and Leander^ 42 - 3 » 224-5, 235;
Shadow of the Nighty 263.

Chappie’s Old English PoetSy 301.
Charles I, King of England, 8, 277,
295 -

Charles IX, King of France, 156-8,
161-7, 174.

Charlton, H. B., 172, 174, 175 192,

201.

Chettle, Henry, 219, 259; Kind-Harts
Dreamey 240.

Chomley, Richard, 252-5, 307, 309-10.
Churchyard, Thomas, translation of
Pristtay. ^ly 33, 51.

Clark, A. M., Thomas Heywoody 137
148-50.

Clauserus, Conradus, 80.

Cobham, George, 254-5.

Cockman, William, 13.

Coleridge, S. T., 302.

Coligny, Admiral, 157-9.

Collier, J. P., 168.

‘Collier leaf, 151, 168-71.

Coluthus, Rape of Heleny 223.
Companies of Players:

Children of the Chapel, 49, 52, 66.
Children of Paul’s, 52.

Leicester’s, Earl of, 66.

Lord Admiral’s, 27, 52 «., 66, 71,

1 5 1-2, 168, 172, 241.
Nottingham’s, Earl of, 151.
Pembroke’s, Earl of, 172-3, 192,

i94-5» ^37, 241.

Queen Anne’s, 296.

Queen’s, 66,

Strange’s, Lord, 66, 129, 151, 172,
241.

Cooper, C. H.yAthenae Cantabrigiensesy
284-5.

Corkine, William, Second Book of AyreSy
221.

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, 7,
10-16, 20-1, 27, 49, 71, 108, no,
208, 304-6.

Cotton, George, 293.

Cowley, A., The Guardiany 296.
Coxeter, Thomas, 223.

Cradwell (Gradwell), Thomas, 5.
Cranmer, Archbishop, 112.

Crawford, Charles, 198.

Crawford, John, 5, 6.

Creagh, Richard (Archbishop of
Armagh), 288 n.

Cunningham, Francis, 302.

Curry, William, 272.

Dabyns, Henry, 272.

Danby, William, 270-1.

Danchin, F. C., 72, 225, 305.

Dane HeWy Munk of Leicester y 143
H 9 *

Davies, Sir John, EpigramSy 29-30.

Dilke, C. W., Old English Playsy 301.

Dixon, Alice, 288.

Z). Johann Fausteny Historia vony 203,
207.

Doctor Faustusy A Ballad of the life and
death ofy 203.

Dodsley, R., Old PlaySy 300-1.

Drake, Sir Francis, 27.

Draper, Nicholas, 272.

Drayton, Michael, 234, 297.

Drummond, William, 289.

Drurie, Thomas, 253.

Dryden, John, 300, 314.

Dyce, Alexander, 301.

Eccles, Mark, Jonson and the Spiesy 289;
Marlowe in LondoHy 101-6, 223
236, 246 «., 305; Marlowe in Ne%0“
gatey 104 n.

Ede, Mistress, 1 1 7.

Ede, Richard, 117, 127-8, 273.

Edward VI, King of England, 300.

Eliot, T. S., 142 n.

Elizabeth, Queen of England, 23, 26,

1 18, 124, 167, 181, 245, 251 n.y 266,
275, 287, 290.

Ellis-Fermor, Una, I7«., 39, 71-2,
76 n., 840., 93 »., 9S»., 239*.,
260 n.y 305.

Emtley, John, 7.

England's Helicony 220-1.

England's Parnassus, 222.

English Faust Book, 206-1 j.

Ennius, 196.

Essex, Countess of, 123 n.

Essex, Earl of (Robert Devereux), ii6,

1 19, 255, 269, 286.

Euripides, 314.

Execution of Justice, The, 117.

INDEX

331

*F. P.’, translator of the Historia von
D. Johann Fausten^ 203, 206-7, 213-
* 4 . 2 I 7 >.* 36 ;

Famous Victories of Henry V, 205 n.

Farmer, — , 286.

Ffyneux (Phineaux), Sir John, 2.

Field, Giles, 272.

Finch, John, 106.

Fineaux (Phineaux), Thomas, no.

Flasket, John, 42-3, 49 225.

Fleay, F. G., 148, 198.

Fleetwood, William, 105, 117, 268.

Fletcher, John, 294, 314.

Folger, H. C., 168,

Fortescue, Thomas, 76, 80, 84, 88, 1 54.

Foster, Joseph, 247.

Fripp, E. 1 ., 310 n.

Frizer, Ingram, 265, 269-71, 273-4,
286-8, 303-4, 306, 309-10.

Gager, William, Dido^ 52, 55, 57.

Gardiner, William, 246.

Garnett, Henry, 24, 291.

Gamier, Robert, Cornelie^ 284; Marc
Antoine^ 284.

Garrick, David, 300.

Gascoigne, George, 109.

Gawdy, Philip, ytf 73, 97 n.

Gayton, Edmund, 296.

Gell, Thomas, 249.

Gentillet, L, Centre N. Machiavel, 19,
135 -

Glasgow, Archbishop of, 120.

Golder, W., 127.

Golding, Arthur, translator of Meta-
morphoses^ 31, 335 of de Serres’s
Jasper Colignie, 1 59.

Goldsborough, Nicholas, 8.

Gollancz, Sir Israel, 23-4.

Gosson, Thomas, 284.

Gray, Austin K., 26 n.

Greene, Robert, 259; Friar Bacon and
Friar B ungay , 2035 Groatsworth of
fVit, 193-5, 238-41; Never too Late^
1 93 ; Pertmedes the Blacksmt th, 69-7 1 ,
73 » III-

Greg, W. W., 168-9, * 7 ^ ”•> ^^4

Gresshop, John, 8.

Grevell, Mistress, 285.

Guise, Duke of, 129, 135, 152, 154-68,
173 -

Halfpenny, George, 272.

Hall, E. Vine, 268 272 293

304-5-

Halliwell, Edward, 52.

HalHwell-Phillipps, J. O., 168.

Hammon, Thomas, 129.

Harington, Sir John, 19.

Harriot, Thomas, 112, 208, 231, 251,
255, 258, 307.

Harris, Thomas, 15.

Harrison, G. B., 263-4.

Harvey, Gabriel, 73, 278-9.

Harvey, Richard, 278.

Hazlitt, William, 302.

Helliott, Nicholas, 236.

Henderson, Philip, 281 305.

Heneage, Sir Thomas, 128, 266.

Henry III, King of France, 151, 154,
1 61, 174, 260.

Henry VIII, King of England, 6.

Henslowe, Philip, 294, 296; Diary ^ 29,
52 «., 106 129, 151-2, 167 203,

205, 241 ; Papers^ 85 118 n.

Herbert, Sir Henry, 149.

Hesiod, 32.

Hewes, William, 4.

Heywood, Thomas, 298; his connexion
with Jew of Malta^ 129-30; Apology
for Actors^ 69; Captives^ 130, 143 «.,
148—9; JovaiKciov, 149; How a Man
may Choose a Good Wtfe from a Bad,
ip.

Holinshed, Ralph, Chronicle^ 154, 174-
83, 200.

Hollford, Agnes, 118.

Hollford, Ralph, 118.

Homer, 17-18, 32, 262; 7 he Iliad, 53,
94 -

Hopton, Sir Owen, 103-4.

Horsey, Sir Ralph, 25^7.

Hotson, J. Leslie, 269-71, 273, 280;
Death of Christopher Marlowe, 22-3,
25, 293 «., 304; 7 , William Shake-
speare, Do Appoint . . . , 264; Mar-
lowe among the Churchwardens, loi,
105 Shakespeare versus Shallow,
246.

Howard of Effingham, Lord, 241,

Ingram, J. H,, 105 304.

Ironside, Ralph, 256-7.

INDEX

332

Irving, Sir Henry, 306.

Islip, Adam, 224.

Ive, Paul, Practise of Fortification^ 72 “ 3 )
93, loo-

James I, King of England, 295.
Jeaffreson, J. C., loi.

Jeffes, Abel, 204.

Jermine, Sir R., 123 n.

Jerome, The Vulgate, 18, 20.

Johnes, Mr., 16.

Jones, Richard, 73.

Jones, William, 172-3.

Jonson, Ben, 106, 289, 294, 297-8,
300, 311, 3135 Bartholomew Fair,
295; Cynthia's Revels^ 295; Z)w-
coveries^ 295; Epigrams^ 289; Every
Man in his Humour^ 295 ; Isle of Dogs^
289; Poetaster^ 289.

Jordan, John, 5.

Jube (Juby), Edward, 129.

Judson, A. C., 148 149 n.

Justinian, Institutes^ 17.

Kalb, Eugenie de, 126 265 274-

5, 287, 288 304.

Kean, Edmund, 301.

Kellett, Christopher, 114.

Kellner, J. 131.

Kemble, J. P,, 300.

Kett, Francis, no.

Kingsmill, Mistress, 285.

King’s School, Canterbury, 6-8, 1 1, 12,
108, 306.

Kingston, Felix, 224.

Kirby, J. W., 272 287 n.

Kirkman, Francis, 70, 299.

Kitchen, Richard, loi, 105-6, 307.
Knutowski, B., 50-1, 305.

Kyd, Thomas, 103, 1 12, 1 14, 17 1, 199,
241, 276, 294, 307-”, 3H;
Letters to Sir John Puckering,
III, 242-4, 250-1, 259, 266, 276,
278, 285, 304.

Cornelia^ 284.

Murder of John Bretven^ 198.
Solyman and Perseda^ 198, 200-1.
Spanish Tragedy^ 96, 198, 200, 242,
294-

Lamb, Charles, 302, 3 1 1 .

Langbaine, Gerard, 70.

Lawrence, C. E., The Reckoning^ 305.

Laye, Sir John de, 290.

Lee, J., 192-3.

Lee, Sir Sidney, 33 «., loi, 303-4.

Leicester, Earl of (Robert Dudley), 52,
118, 122-3, ^26.

Leicester's Commonwealth^ 123, 125.

Lewgar, Thomas, 13, zi.

Linge, Nicholas, 129, 194.

Linley, Paul, 42-3, 49 224-5, 298.

Littleton, Sir E., 255.

Lodge, Oliver F. W., 283 n.

Lonicerus, P., 88, 100, 131.

Lopez, Roderigo, 132.

Lucan, De Bello Ctvtltj 18, 43-4, 46,
74, 152 .

Lust's Dominion^ 302.

Lydgate, Troy Bookj 93.

Lyly, John, 52; Campaspe, 314; Endy-
mton^ 314.

Machiavelli, 19, k;-6, 173; The

Prince, . 35 - 6 !’. 45 , ^ 39 -

Mackail, J. W., 6i, 65.

Malone, Edmund, 70, 193, 300.

Manwood, Sir Roger, 105, 223, 237-8.

Marley, Christopher, 2.

Marley, Joan, 2.

Marley, John, i.

Marley, Richard, 2.

Marlor (or Mathews), Christopher,
23-4-

Marlowe, Ann, 3, 5.

Marlowe, Christopher:

Birth and christening, 1-3; family
connexions, 3-6; scholar at the
King’s School, Canterbury, 6-95
career at Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge, 10-21; Privy Council's
certificate of good service, 21-7;
departure for London, 27; in-
volved in fatal affray in Hog Lane,
confined in Newgate, released
on recognizance, and discharged at
Gaol-delivery, 10 1-5; his two sure-
ties, 105-7; first charges of atheism
by Thomas Kyd and others, 1 10-13.

Question of his authorship of First
Part of the Contention and T rue T rage-
dy^ 1 92-7, and of Arden of Fever sham,
198-200; friction with constables of

INDEX

Holywell St., 236; probably author
of dedication of Watson’s Amintae
Gaudia and of Latin elegy on Sir R.
Manwood, 236-8 ; attacks by Greene
modified by Chettle, 238-40; allega-
tions by Kyd in his letters to Sir J.
Puckering, 241-3; arrested by order
of Privy Council, 244-5 ; denounced
by R. Baines in his Note, 245, 250-2;
accused by Chomley of reading
atheist lecture to Raleigh, 255-6;
discussion of his ‘atheism’, 258-62;
killed at Deptford by Ingram Frizer,
270-1 ; the Coroner’s jury and
their verdict, 272-7; contemporary
references to his death, 277-82.

Rapid decline of Marlowe’s
theatrical popularity in Stuart
period, 294-5; seventeenth-century
references to, and reprints of, his
plays and poems, 296-300; editions
of his works begin to multiply in
nineteenth century, 301-3; new bio-
graphical light on his career, 303-5 ;
the Marlowe Memorial, 306; para-
doxical features of his life and per-
sonality, 306-9; his place in English
dramatic history, 309-14.

Plays and Poems.

Description of Seas^ &c., in England's
Parnassus^ 222 - 3 .

Dido, Queen of Carthage, 49 - 68 , 29,
51, 71, 80, 174, 196, 199, 203, 212,
217, 222, 225, 235, 301, 305.
Doctor Faustus, The Tragical History
of, 201 - 19 , 16, 17, 20, 29, 42, 44,
51, 66, 71, 154, 166, 196, 199, 237,
259, 262, 294, 296-7, 299, 300,

303, 305, 313-14-

Edward the Second, King of England,
172 - 201 , 29, 51, 150, 153-4, 217,
237, 260, 296, 298-303, 314.

Hero and Leander, 224 - 35 , 18, 29,
42-3, 5^ 69, 1 12, 175, 220, 237,
282-3, 294, 298-9.

Jew of Malta, 129 - 50 , 19, 20, 69,
108, 155-6, 163-5, 168, 173, 194,
199, 217, 222, 241, 260, 295-301,

314-

Lucads First Book, 42 - 8 , 225, 298,
301.

333

Ovid's Elegies, 28-42 {see also under
Ovid, Amores).

Massacre at Paris, 151 - 71 , 16, 29,
*74, *77, *79, *81 19*,

196-7, 207, 217, 241, 260.
Passionate Shepherd, 220 - 2 , 1 50.
Tamburlaine the Great (both Parts),
18, 27, 30, 42-3, 51, 66-8, 70, 105,
108, III, 1 1 5, 127, 155, 160, 166,
200, 203-4, 2*5 229-30, 237,

241,279, 295, 302, 305, 313.

First Part of, 6;h87, 48, 199, 208.
Second Part of, 88 - 100 , 113,131-2,
141, 212, 217, 260-2.

Marlowe, Dorothy, 3, 5.

Marlowe, Captain Edmund, 1 14.
Marlowe, Joan (Jane), 2, 3, 4, 6, 9.
Marlowe, John, i, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7.
Marlowe, Margaret, 3, 5.

Marlowe, Mary, 3.

Marlowe, Thomas, 3.

Marot, C., 227.

Martin, L. C., Marlowe's Poems,

34-5.

Martin, Sir Richard, 286.

Martyn, Elias, 4.

Mary, Queen of Scots, 27, 119, 266,
288 n., 291-3.

Masuccio di Salerno, 143 n., 148.
Maude, Barnard, 288.

Maunder, Henry, 244-5.

McKerrow, R. B., Works of Thomas
Nashe, 50.

Medici, Catherine de, 157.

Meeres, Thomas, 106.

Melton, John, The Astrologaster, 296.
Mendez, Alvaro, 132.

Meres, Francis, Palladis Tamia, 280-1,
3 * 0 .

Mexia, Pedro, 76.

Millington, Thomas, 129, 192-3.
Milton, John, 77, 210, 299; Lycidas,
262; Paradise Lost, 262.

Mincoff, M. K., 72.

Miques, Juan, 131.

Moody, Michael, 267.

Moore, Hale, 279 n.

Moore, John, 4, 6.

Moore Smith, G. C., ii, 13, 22, 268,

304-5-

Morgan, Thomas, 119-22, 266, 273.

INDEX

334

Mode, Simon, i.

Mode, Thomas, i.

Morle, William, i .

Modey, Christopher (of Trinity Col-
lege, Cambridge), 23.

Munday, Thomas, 13.

Musaeus, Hero and Leander^ 53, 224,
227, 229-32, 235.

Mychell, Thomas, 4.

Napper, Edward, 264.

Nashe, Thomas, 239, 297, 307;

problem of part-authorship of Dtdoy
Queen of Carthage^ 49 “ 5 M
Fennilesse^ 114; Summers Last Will
and *Iestamentj 50; Unfortunate
Traveller {Jack Wtlton), 30, 50.
Navarre, King of, 156, 161-7, 260.
Newton, Thomas, 70.

Nicholls, Allen, 236.

Norgate, Robert, 21.

North, Lord, 117, 123 n.

Notes and Queries, 223.

Old English Drama, 301.

Oliphant, E. H. C., 200.

Olive, Richard, 204 n.

Ortelius, Abraham, Tbeatrum Orhts
Terr arum, 17, 88, 91, 98, 100, 154.
Orwin, Thomas, 204.

Orwin, Widow, 49.

Osborne, T., 50.

Ovid, 18, 75, 81, 85, 230, 233, 262, 31 1.
Amores {Elegies), 29-42, 18, 44-6,
51, 80, 196, 198-9, 203, 218,
225 - 7 » 233 - 5 ) 294, 298.

Fasti, 18.

Herotdes, 18, 31, 33-4, 37, 196,
225-7.

Metamorphoses, 31, 33, 56, 161 n.,
189 n.

Tristia, 31, 33.

Oxberry, William, 301.

Oxinden, Henry, 19, no, 237, 280 n.

Paget, Charles, 120, 122.

Parker, Archbishop, 7, 1 1, 20, 1 10, 306.
Parker, John, n, 12, 108, 208.
Parnassus Trilogy, the, 25, 31, 309.
Parrot, ? Henry, 289.

Parsons, Robert, 113, 152-
Pashley, Christopher, 10, ii.

Passi, David, 132.

Passionate Pilgrim, 220.

Paulinus, F., 227.

Pavier, Thomas, 192, 194.

Peele, George, 239, 271 ; Edward 1 , 201.
Peile, James, 285.

Pembroke, Countess of, 236.
Pembroke, Earl of, 241.

Penley, S., 301.

Percy, Bishop, 301.

Perkins, Richard, 130.

Perondinus, Petrus, 75-6, 78, 80, 83-4,
88, 100.

Perry, M. J., 168.

Philip II, King of Spain, 83.

Phillips, Edward, Theatrum Poetarum,
70, 299.

Poel, William, 274, 283 n., 305.

Poley, Edmund, 1 1 6.

Poley, Robert, 27, 104, 116-28, 265-8,
273-6, 286, 288-93, 308, 310.
Pollard, A. W., 192, 195.

Pollen, J. H., 288 n.

Poole, John, 104, 116, 251-2.

Pooley, John, 116.

Pooley, Robert, 293 n.

Pope Sixtus V, 1 51.

Poulet, Sir Amias, 119, 122.

Poynter, James, 1 1 .

Proctor, John, The Fal of the Late
Arrian, 1 12-13, 171 n., 256.

Prouty, C. T., 109 n.

Puckering, Sir John, 111-12, 171
241-4, 255, 276, 304.

Radford (a tailor), 167.

Raleigh, Carew, 256.

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 90, 1 13-14, 121,
231, 244, 251-2, 255-8, 263, 276,
310; History of the World, 84 261 ;

Reply to Passionate Shepherd, 221;
The Sceptic, 260; The Soul, 260-1.
Ramus, Petrus, 16, 159-60; Dialectica,
160,

Randall, Wolstan, 272.

Redman, Agnes, 106.

Reed, Isaac, 300.

Reve, Grace, 285.

Reynolds, Henry, 297.

Richardson, Gerard, 2.

Ritson, Joseph, 300.

INDEX

Ritwise, John, 52.

Robinson, George, 301.

Robsart, Amy, 127.

Rodd, Thomas (bookseller), 168, 171.
Roen, — , 253.

Rogers, R., and Ley, W., play-lists, 70,

299.

Rowland, Edmund, 107.

Rowland, Humphrey, loi, 105, 107,

307-

Rowland, Mary, 107.

Rowley, Samuel, When You See Me
You Know Me^ 205; Additions to
Doctor Faustusy 205, 207, 294.
Roxburghe Ballads^ 220.

Roydon, Matthew, 113, 243-4, 263-4,
268.

Ruse (Rewse), Henry, 21.

Rushe, Anthony, 8.

Russell, Thomas, 264.

Rutkin, Robert, 267.

Sachs, Hans, i.

Sackville, Thomas, Gorboduc^ 3 1 1 ; In-
duction^ 31 1.

Saint-Denis, A. de, 149.

St. Leger, John, 248-9.

Saunders, C., Yamerlane the Great^

300.

Scott, Sir W., Yhe Ancient British
Dratna^ 301.

Seaton, Ethel, 17 «., 80 88, 91, 95

ii4«., ii6«., ii7«., 126 131

254 267 275, 289, 293

304-v

Selim H, Sultan, 13 1.

Seneca, 187.

Serres, Jean de. Commentaries, 155,
157-8, 1 60-1, 166, 174; Lyfe of
Jasper Coltgnie, 159 «.

Shakespeare, William, 106, 167, 240,
297> 299» 3oo> 308, 310-11, 314.

As You Like It, 230, 283, 314; Ham-
let, 57-8, 84 (Ophelia), 277 (Grave-
diggers), 31 1, 314; Julius Caesar,
152, 155 »., 166; I King Henry IV
(Falstaff), 94; 2 King Henry IV, 24;
j King Henry VI, 192; 2 King
Henry VI (First Part of the Conten-
tion), 192-7; 3 King Henry VI (The
True Tragedy), 152, 192-7; King

335

John, i^7‘,KingRichard II,22S,ZH\
Love's Labour's Lost, 263; Lucrece,
256, Macbeth, 84, 191 ; Merchant
of Venice, 30, 314; Merry Wives of
Windsor, 22 1 ; Midsummer Night's
Dream, 58, 60; Much Ado About
Nothing, 314; Pericles, 192; Romeo
and Juliet, 235; Tempest (Prospero),
218; Titus Andronicus, 295.

Shawe, Robert, 129.

Shelley, P. B., 6, 8.

Shrewsbury, Lord, 109 n.

Sidney, Sir Philip, 121-2, 244, 273,
293; Astrophel and Stella, 310.

Simmes, Valentine, 205.

Simpson, Percy, 206 n., 305.

Singer, S. W., Select English Poets,
301.

Sir John Oldcastle, 194.

Skeres, Jerome, 268.

Skeres, Nicholas (the elder), 268.

Skeres, Nicholas, 125, 265, 268-75,
286.

Slater, John, 253.

Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music, 221.

Sophocles, 314.

Southampton, Earl of, 263-4.

Southwell, Robert, 291-2.

Spenser, Edmund, FacrtV Queene, 72-3.

Spurgeon, Caroline, Shakespeare's
Imagery, 48.

Stationers’ Register, 29, 42-3, 71, 73,
129, 1 71, 192, 194, 198, 200-1, 203-
4, 224, 236.

Steevens, George, 300-1.

Strange, Lord, 241.

Strong, Richard, 254.

Stuart, Lady Arabella, 109 n.

Suckling, Sir John, The Goblins, 70.

Sussex, Countess of, 284.

Sussex, Earl of, 242 n.

Swift, Hugo, 102.

Swinburne, A. C., 6, 8, 305.

Sykes, H. Dugdale, 198, 205.

Taming of A Shrew, 204-6.

Tannenbaum, Samuel, 171, 274, 276 «.

Tanner, Thomas, 50,

Tarlton, Richard, 66.

Tasso, T., 227.

Taylor, John, 298.

INDEX

336

Terence, Andria^ 136 «.

Theatres;

Curtain, 103.

Drury Lane, 301.

Fortune, 296.

Red Bull, 296.

Rose, 1 5 1, 167.

Theater, 103.

Thexton, Robert, 1 1 .

Thimme, Margarete, 149,

Thorpe, Thomas, 42.

Thurmond, John, 299, 300.

Tibullus, 32.

Timme, T., 153.

Tipping, James, 126 «.

Tooke, Christopher, 114.

Treatise of Schism, 117,

Trenchard, Sir George, 256-7, 260.
Turberville, George, translation of
Heroides, 31, 33-4, 37, 51.

Umbarffeld, Richard, 4.

Vaughan, William, Golden Grove,
270 281.

Vavasour, Nicholas, 130.

Venn, John and J. A., ii7«., 285.
Virgil, 32, 262, 31 1 ; Aeneid, 18, 49, 53-
66, 80, 87, 196.

Wagner, A., 302-3.

Wakeman, Robert, 264.

Waller, A. D., 172, 174, 175 192,

201.

Walpole, Sir Hugh, 306.

Walsingham, Frances (Lady Sidney),
121, i24«., 293.

Walsingham, Sir Francis, 72, 117, 121-
5, 127, 245, 249, 265, 291-3, 310.
Walsingham, La^ (Audrey), 224, 287.
Walsingham, Sir Thomas, 103, 122, 125,
127, 224-5, 245. 265! 270, 276,

287. 293, 307-

Walton, Izaak, Compleat Angler, 221-2.
Ward, Sir A. W., 203, 206.

Warner, Walter, 1 12-13.

Warner, William, 113, 297.

Warton, Thomas, 50, 300.

Watson, Thomas, 102-4, *22,

237-8, 245, 305, 307, 309; Amintae
Gaudia, 223, 237; ^EKarofiTradCa,
103; Helenae Rap tus, 2245 Melibceus,
103.

Wentworth, Lord, 116.

White, Edward, 151, 204.

Whitgift, Archbishop, 50.

Whitmore, J. B., 24.

Williamson, Nicholas, 286, 288 «,
Williamson, William, 106.

Wtllobie his Avisa, 263-4.

Willoughby (Willobie), Henry, 264.
Willoughby, William, 264.

Wilson, J. Dover, 283 n.

Winwood, Sir Ralph, 168.

Wolf, John, 42, 224, 278.

Wolsey, Cardinal, 52.

Wood (a tailor), 1 1 7.

Wood, Anthony, 70, 281.

Woodcocke, Thomas, 49.

Woodleff, Anne, 269.

Woodleff, Drew, 269-70.

Woodrofe, Lady, 285.

Woodrofe, Mistress, 285.

Woodrofe, Sir N., 285.

Woodrofe, Robert (? Woodrup, Roger),
249, 285-6.

Wright, John, 205.

Wright, Thomas, 24.

Wroth, Robert, 105.

Wyld, Stephen, 104.

Yeomans, Joan, 117, 127-8, 273.
Yeomans, William, 117, 122, 127-8,
273 -

Yorkshire Tragedy, 194.

Young, Henry, 254.

Young, Justice, 255.

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, OXFORD
BY JOHN JOHNSON, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

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